&gt; The student debt crisis has been getting worse and worse over the past decade, and Thiel&#x27;s real core idea is that student debt is a huge barrier for young people to take risks (such as starting or joining a startup) during or after college.<p>I also recognize the debt issue, although I suspect that most of the Thiel Fellows would have little trouble getting full scholarships, as I did, or come from stable, upper middle class households with high-achieving parents who would be able and willing to cover the cost of tuition, as I also did. My point is that college dropouts or recent graduates (even from elite colleges) are not necessarily the best people to start successful high-growth ventures, regardless of whether they&#x27;re in debt or not. Just because Zuck did it with Facebook (although from what you said, this didn&#x27;t figure into Thiel&#x27;s decision to start the Fellowship) doesn&#x27;t mean that it makes sense to encourage high-achieving college students to drop out and start a business - and the results have borne that out (though perhaps your internal data says otherwise).<p>In essence:<p>1. By the time someone is an ideal high-growth startup founder, college debt should no longer be a big concern, either because they never had it in the first place or because they paid it off with the high-paying job they got after college.<p>2. Most of those who are suffering from high amounts of student debt are probably never going to be ready to found a high-growth startup that someone like Thiel would be interested in anyway.<p>The real solution to the student debt crisis is to optimize high school education such that it is sufficient for most jobs (or perhaps high school education, followed by part-time associate degree + co-op), and alter societal&#x2F;employers&#x27; expectations to accept that a BS is overkill. Unfortunately, that is a very thorny sociopolitical issue that isn&#x27;t easily solvable by throwing money at moonshot companies founded by smart young people, and it&#x27;s this latter activity that Thiel has the most experience in.<p>Before a BS became table stakes for decent employment, you could rely on free, government-provided education to get you to a good job.  Getting high-achieving students to drop out of elite colleges to start high-growth ventures is a fundamentally orthogonal matter to returning society to that norm.