Teen entrepreneurs getting paid to drop out?
PayPal founder Peter Thiel wants young innovators to jump start their entrepreneurial careers. Why that might not be a good idea.
PayPal co-founder and founder of Clarium Capital Management, Peter Thiel was photographed in his New York City home on Oct. 14, 2006. Founded in 1998, PayPal enables an anyone with an email address to send and receive payments online. Clarium is a global macro hedge fund with offices in San Francisco and New York. Mr. Thiel is offering to pay teenage entrepreneurs $100,000 to drop out of school and start innovating.
John Marshall Mantell / SIPA / Newscom
There has been quite a buzz about Clarium Capital president Peter Thiel's idea to pay college students to drop out of school. From Techcrunch:
One of the things that we think is very important is to encourage potentially young entrepreneurs to actually get involved in a science technology and in creating all this great value for the next generation. So one of the initiatives that we're gonna be starting over the next few weeks is a program for offering grants of up to $100,000 to up to 20 people under age 20 for starting something new. They're dropping out of school. Or stopping out of school.... I do thing there are a lot of things people learn in school. I don't think they learned anything much about entrepreneurship.
I would like to extend an open invitation to Thiel to come and visit our program here at Belmont University. I would love to show him our paths to experiential learning for our students. We would be happy to have him meet our student and alumni entrepreneurs, some of whom dropped out only to come back to school when they realized what they were missing.
He might be very surprised how much our students are learning about entrepreneurship!
Add/view comments on this post.
------------------------------
The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.