Earlier this summer before his freshman year at Stanford University was set to begin, Sebastian Tan read Peter Thiel's "Zero to One." The book changed the trajectory of his life.
Instead of enrolling in classes that fall, Tan applied for Palantir's (NASDAQ:PLTR) Meritocracy Fellowship, a semester-long, paid program that offers attendees a shot at a full-time role. He earned a spot and deferred his Stanford enrollment to the fall of 2026.
“There’s such an opportunity cost of going to college. In the tech world now, things are moving so fast,” Tan told Business Insider. “If you’re in school all day, the world just passes you by.”
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“In college, you don’t learn the building skills that you need for a startup,” he said. “You’re learning computer science theory and stuff like that. It’s just not as helpful if you want to go into the workforce.”
Many of tech's biggest superstars have been college dropouts. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg all elected to skip out on a degree in favor of growing their fledgling companies.
At the time, the luminaries' decisions to skip higher education were outside of the norm. Today, they're becoming anything but.
Adam Guild, the founder of restaurant marketing platform Owner, told Business Insider that he felt going to college and learning from ivory-towered professors rather than real-world builders was a waste of time.
"If I can study how [other founders] became successful, that is a fast track to getting that guidance from people that have done what I want to do,” he said. “Versus getting a bunch of theory that was taught in an MBA program.”
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Mercor founder and COO Surya Midha shared a similar sentiment on X, writing, "Universities were once our filtering mechanism—the algorithm we trusted to identify exceptional… [Now] A degree feels less like a distinction than a delay. The autodidact is the new alumnus."
A variety of factors, including the prohibitive cost of a four-year program and the growth of AI tools that make it easier to become a founder, are driving this trend. As is the current Silicon Valley fixation on being high agency, or what previous generations would have called being a go-getter.
“In the era of the internet, if you have to go to college, it is probably because you’re mediocre,” Vox Genius co-founder Arbaaz Mahmood told Business Insider. “Honestly, nobody goes to college thinking they’re going to change the world. That’s a vacuous lie we tell VCs to get their money. Nobody builds startups to change the world. It’s just bulls–t.”
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Not everyone is convinced by this anti-college movement. “Very, very few people are truly autodidactic,” Harvard economist David Deming told the website. "I think a lot of them are fooling themselves."
Deming also pointed out that the number of successful founders who dropped out of college, or never attended in the first place, is "vanishingly small." Across nearly every occupation, he says, those who have a degree earn more than those without. Additionally, when it comes to the average American, the return on investment for a college degree exceeds the returns on investing in the stock market, buying a home, or starting a business.
As for the would-be founders? "The question is, would they do better or worse if they had gone to college?" Deming says. They get exposed to new ideas or new people, and they pivot. You know, founders pivot all the time.”
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