I suspected as much. This is someone attacking a straw man to generate controversy.
Thanks for finding those quotes.
> are there 20 of those 60,000 who should perhaps not go to college
And he presumes he and his staff are uniquely qualified in identifying those 20 out of 60,000?
He isn't saying "There exist exactly 20 people out of 60k who should not go to college and I have oracular ability for identifying them." He is saying "It is arrogant to assume that, out of 60,000 people attending college, it is impossible to find so many as 20 of them who would be better served by another alternative." Presumably, he thinks the actual numbers is substantially higher than 20, but he doesn't have to get locked in to the extremist position of saying "60,000 of 60,000 people should not go to college" to believe that. It could plausibly be that 99% of people are served perfectly adequately by college and identifying only 20 of the remaining 600 isn't really rocket science compared to the actual rocket science that other Paypal alums are doing.
"The elitist view in the U.S. is that even if people concede that college is not for education, the caveat will be that, well, surely it’s for all the smart people. What we want to suggest is that there are some very smart and very talented people who don’t need college."
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/257531/back-future-pe...
"...are there 20 of those 60,000 who should perhaps not go to college--that does not seem like a terribly controversial statement. That the more talented you are, the more narrow the set of choices you should make? And that if you're a really smart person, the only thing in the world you can do is to go to Harvard?"
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20114584-281/talking-tech-...