peter thiel on academia

But I think the question we have to always ask is “how many people should we be training”? My intuition is you want the gates to be very tight. One of my friends is a professor in the Stanford economics department. the way he describes it to me is there’s about thirty graduate students starting economics PhDs at Stanford every year. It’s 6-8 years to get a PhD. At the end of the first year the faculty has an implicit ranking of the students where they agree who the top three or four are. The ranking never changes. The top three or four are able to get a good position in academia–the others not so much. We’re pretending to be kind to people and we’re actually being cruel.

# Peter Thiel
# 19 Jul 2019
# The Portal Episode 1: An Era of Stagnation & Universal Institutional Failure