Rethink model of higher education
ONE of the strongest endorsements that US President Donald Trump received when he clinched the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 was from tech-entrepreneur billionaire, Peter Thiel, one of the founders of Paypal, the world’s leading online payment services.
Thiel’s endorsement of Trump was particularly noteworthy because he was the first openly gay Republican to address the Republican national convention and to do so by making reference to his sexuality.
Given the strong anti-gay rights sentiment within much of the Republican party, Thiel’s support of the party may seem at odds with his own individual rights outlook.
But, in fact, Thiel’s worldview aligns very strongly with the Trumpist call to make “America Great Again” because the techbillionaire strongly believes that western civilisation is the standardbearer for human freedoms and technological advancement, with the US being the leader in this regard.
For Thiel, the greatness of the United States is found, not so much in being open and globalist, but in being singularly focused on “higher and loftier” goals of civilizational advancement, goals which he feels the West has abandoned under pressure from anti-West political correctness and multiculturalism, especially on American university campuses.
In spite of Thiel’s pro-Westernism, he propounds a range of ideas some of which I feel are worth engaging in our own context.
In particular, Thiel’s views on the structural problems facing global higher education ought to be taken seriously.
Thiel argues that the “degree” has become more of an insurance policy than an educational process.
By that Thiel means more and more students have to obtain degrees at high cost to ensure that they are certified against job uncertainty and even higher competition in the job market.
The argument about higher education being less about education and more about commodification is of course, not novel.
But what is novel is that Thiel sees the overemphasis on competitiveness as being destructive rather than constructive.
In education then, he argues that creative and bright students wind up competing for prizes within a system that really offers few opportunities for innovation, and instead of breaking the mould, they are being rewarded for reproducing the system.
Reflecting on his own experience as a top Stanford student, Thiel feels that the competitiveness of elite higher education only landed him back in the system as a bright young lawyer who wound up in offices where his actual creativity could not change the world.
Until, that is, he walked out and later formed Paypal.
Thiel mocks high performance awards such as the Mandela-Rhodes scholarship, stating that its recipients have “a great future behind them” – that is, all their youthful creative potential was wasted on obtaining elite education’s institutionaliased rewards.
To this end, Thiel funds a certain number of young people to drop out of university and invest their energy in tech start-ups.
Now there are obvious arguments against this view – it is after all, the mega-infrastructure of public higher education that created the possibilities for giant leaps in research and development.
So it is surely not the system that Thiel is addressing, but rather a caution to the individual not to remain intellectually and creatively dependent within its strictures.
To think about our own education crisis in South Africa is to think of education as a crisis presenting an opportunity to think completely out of the box, as if there was no script.
While it is clear that the majority of the mass education system is in crisis, there is always an assumption that elite institutions are producing worthwhile graduates.
Thiel’s idea that competition does not always produce innovation is counterintuitive but true. To be the best graduate in a stagnating system merely means to reproduce sameness.
South Africans are very wedded to the idea that elite institutions can produce world changing ideas, but my sense is that Thiel is correct in prompting us to rethink this.