Jacob Weisberg may not believe that (I do) but he calls Thiel out on this:

The Thiel Fellowship will pay would-be entrepreneurs under 20 $100,000 in cash to drop out of school. In announcing the program, Thiel made clear his contempt for American universities which, like governments, he believes, cost more than they’re worth and hinder what really matters in life, namely starting tech companies. His scholarships are meant as an escape hatch from these insufficiently capitalist institutions of higher learning.

Where to start with this nasty idea? A basic feature of the venture capitalist’s worldview is its narcissism, and with that comes the desire to clone oneself—perhaps literally in Thiel’s case. Thus Thiel fellows will have the opportunity to emulate their sponsor by halting their intellectual development around the onset of adulthood, maintaining a narrow-minded focus on getting rich as young as possible, and thereby avoid the siren lure of helping others or contributing to the advances in basic science that have made the great tech fortunes possible. Thiel’s program is premised on the idea that America suffers from a deficiency of entrepreneurship. In fact, we may be on the verge of the opposite, a world in which too many weak ideas find funding and every kid dreams of being the next Mark Zuckerberg. This threatens to turn the risk-taking startup model into a white boy’s version of the NBA, diverting a generation of young people from the love of knowledge for its own sake and respect for middle-class values.

Thiel doesn’t call it “dropping out of school;” he calls it “stopping out of school.” He first discussed the idea at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco in September (CrunchBase Thiel profile; Techmeme discussion).

At Disrupt he framed it as a solution to crippling student debt. In a WSJ interview last weekend — its telling headline, Technology = Salvation — he says a college education is like a subprime mortgage:

“University administrators are the equivalent of subprime mortgage brokers,” he says, “selling you a story that you should go into debt massively, that it’s not a consumption decision, it’s an investment decision. Actually, no, it’s a bad consumption decision. Most colleges are four-year parties.”

Weisberg also points to a personal statement from Thiel, The Education of a Libertarian, produced last year for the CATO Foundation. In it Thiel explains that he “no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

LATER: Reason’s rebuttal from Jesse Walker says, “If Weisberg wants to convince the rest of us that this is a dumb argument, he should start by engaging the argument itself…So as a critique, this is shoddy stuff.” Funny, though, I don’t see Walker engaging Weisberg.