It's Getting Harder to Believe in Silicon Valley

In late 2010, during a fireside chat at the tech-industry conference TechCrunch Disrupt, the venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel disclosed that he would award 20 enterprising teenagers $100,000 apiece over two years to bypass college in favor of entrepreneurship. “Stopping out,” Thiel called it. Having decried student debt (not to mention universities' inculcation of political correctness), he endeavored to make the case that college was a limiting and outdated model.