The Thiel Fellowship is a fellowship created by billionaire Peter Thiel through the Thiel Foundation. The fellowship is intended for students under the age of 23 and offers them a total of $100,000 over two years, as well as guidance and other resources, to drop out of school and pursue other work, which could involve scientific research, creating a startup, or working on a social movement. Selection for the fellowship is through a competitive annual process, with about 20–25 fellows selected annually. It has a selection rate below 0.1%.
History
Peter Thiel announced the fellowship at TechCrunch Disruptin September 2010. The first round of fellows, based on applications made at the end of 2010, was announced in May 2011. The second round of fellows, based on applications made at the end of 2011, was announced in June 2012. The third class includes 22 fellows working on projects from garment manufacturing and B2B web products to ARM powered servers and biomedicine. The class includes 7 fellows from outside of the US. In December 2013, Lora Kolodny wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal reviewing the Thiel Fellowship, where she wrote: "64 Thiel Fellows have started 67 for-profit ventures, raised $55.4 million in angel and venture funding, published two books, created 30 apps and 135 full-time jobs, and brought clean water and solar power to 6,000 Kenyans who needed it." The 2014 Thiel Fellows were announced in June 2014.
The Thiel Fellowship launched a website called "20 Under 20 Documentary Series" that features an online documentary series of four Thiel Fellowship recipients. The students featured in the series are Laura Deming, Chris Rueth, Sujay Tyle, and Alex Kiselev.
Reception
Initial reception
Thiel's announcement of the Thiel Fellowship met with a diverse array of responses. Some, such as Jacob Weisberg, criticized Thiel's proposal for its utopianism and attack on the importance of education. Others, such as Vivek Wadhwa, expressed skepticism about whether the success or failure of the Thiel Fellowship would carry any broader lessons regarding the value of higher education or the wisdom of dropping out. In May 2011, shortly after the announcement of the first batch of Thiel Fellows, the admissions office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology congratulated two MIT students for receiving the Thiel Fellowship. Both students would need to drop out of MIT to receive the fellowship, but would be able to return to MIT to resume their studies after completing the two-year term of the fellowship if they so desired.
Later reception
A year after the announcement of the first batch of Thiel Fellows, opinions on the program ranged from the skeptical and critical to the laudatory and optimistic. Eric Markowitz offered a mixed review of the Thiel Fellowship in Inc. magazine. In April 2013, an article by Richard Nieva for PandoDaily took a close look at how the first batch of Thiel Fellows had fared. Thiel Fellowship organizers stated in 2014 that they wanted to include more women among selectees. In September 2013, Vivek Wadhwa wrote that the Thiel Fellowship had failed to produce any notable successes to date, and even its limited successes were instances where the Thiel Fellows were working in collaboration with more experienced individuals. On October 10, 2013, former Harvard University PresidentLarry Summers was reported as having said at the Nantucket Project conference: "I think the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade is Peter Thiel's special program to bribe people to drop out of college." His remarks were reported on by many media outlets, ranging from TechCrunch to Valleywag. On October 13, TechCrunch published a response to Summers co-written by a Thiel Fellow and a mentor for the Thiel Fellowship program.
