“You dropped 150 grand on an education you could have gotten for $1.50 in late charges at the public library.” Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting

Matt Damon’s quote is being taken literally. Peter Thiel, an investor in Facebook, has announced a unique proposition. Thiel will fund projects from school dropouts. The projects should be world changing and each project will receive a $100,000. An incubator for projects by college dropouts.

Just how healthy is Mr. Thiel’s chutzpah to the young minds?

For starters, people don’t drop out of college to build great products or startups. People drop out of college because they are building or have built great products or startups.

The stories of college drop outs are glitzy and glamorous. They are not necessarily worth following. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are the commonly sighted examples. What everyone don’t realize is Bill Gates got some extraordinary opportunities on his way to billion dollar wealth. Zuckerberg had similar opportunities. And dropping out of college was their only option to make it big. Because in a sense, they somehow had something big. Besides great startups and great stories don’t just happen by following someone. They just happen.

It is important to differentiate college and education. Education is a continual and life long process. College is where you pay big bucks to get a fancy degree. For some part of life, that fancy degree is needed. It is valuable. Take the case of India :  Dhirubhai Ambani of the Reliance empire is the only one who comes to my mind who has built an empire without a college degree. None of the young guns who run the top corporate empires have dropped out of college. In fact the pedigree of the corporate honchos follows a pattern. It’s a matter of whether they went to both IIT and IIM or just IIT or just IIM. Also how long have the stayed in the US matters. Majority is flooded with entrepreneurs who fall into the trio of IIT-US-IIM buckets. Off late, since the reverse brain drain is happening, there are US educated folks who are returning to either run operations or set shop.

Many companies have found out that students graduating from Indian colleges are not ready for the corporate world. A year or two has to be spent on them in bringing them up to speed. Infosys spends huge amount of money in training people. It even built a campus in Mysore for training. Graduates have to be polished to enter the corporate world. To enter the corporate world and get a real education, students need college degrees.

In India, people without college degree hardly get any attention. Politics, Movies and cricket are the only three fields where people get attention without going to college. At least in India. Until, Rashmi Bansal writes a new book : 25 startup founders without college degrees, I will stand on this position.

Building a startup or running an organization without college degree is only for chosen few. Just like playing cricket for 20 years and being at the top of the game is only reserved for Sachin Tendulkar. Everyone else, which is a significant number, need college and the certificate.

College is like an entrance exam for education.

PS : The students who dropped to take Thiel’s offer, might never drop if it wasn’t for a $100,000 funding. To judge the success of the programme, it would be a chicken and egg problem too. Zuckerberg and Gates did not have  Thiel drop-out fund. They just had guts, instincts and a personal compass guiding them through the path. Can you really incentivize all this? Can you incentivize instincts?