Palantir's 'Meritocracy Fellowship' Urges High School Grads to Skip College's 'Indoctrination' and Debt (thestreet.com)
- Reference: 0177017279
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/04/13/2342232/palantirs-meritocracy-fellowship-urges-high-school-grads-to-skip-colleges-indoctrination-and-debt
- Source link: https://www.thestreet.com/technology/palantir-launches-controversial-new-workplace-initiative
And now Palantir "is taking a similar approach as it maneuvers to attract new talent," [2]reports financial news site The Street :
> The company has launched what it refers to as the "Meritocracy Fellowship," a four-month internship program for recent high school graduates who have not enrolled in college. The position pays roughly $5,400 per month, more than plenty of post-college internship programs. Palantir's [3]job posting suggests that the company is especially interested in candidates with experience in programming and statistical analysis.
[4]Palantir's job listing specifically says they launched their four-month fellowship "in response to the shortcomings of university admissions," promising it would be based "solely on merit and academic excellence" (requiring an SAT score over 1459 or an ACT score above 32.) "Opaque admissions standards at many American universities have displaced meritocracy and excellence..."
> As a result, qualified students are being denied an education based on subjective and shallow criteria. Absent meritocracy, campuses have become breeding grounds for extremism and chaos... Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination. Get the Palantir Degree...
>
> Upon successful completion of the Meritocracy Fellowship, fellows that have excelled during their time at Palantir will be given the opportunity to interview for full-time employment at Palantir.
[1] https://thielfellowship.org/faq
[2] https://www.thestreet.com/technology/palantir-launches-controversial-new-workplace-initiative
[3] https://jobs.lever.co/palantir/7fa0ceca-c30e-48de-9b27-f98469c374f3?lever-origin=applied&lever-source%5B%5D=APRIL2025
[4] https://jobs.lever.co/palantir/7fa0ceca-c30e-48de-9b27-f98469c374f3?lever-origin=applied&lever-source%5B%5D=APRIL2025
and if you don't get a full time gig? (Score:1)
Off to college to get some dept, indoctrination and exremelism.
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I love the poorly educated
-Donald Trump
Re: (Score:1)
All politicians do.
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>> I love the poorly educated
>> -Donald Trump
> All politicians do.
Yes. But not all politicians want to help people get an education.
Re: and if you don't get a full time gig? (Score:2, Informative)
Only the worst of the worst paint themselves orange and say it out loud. Btw, without idiots, your beloved capitalism would fail miserably.
Planitir (Score:2)
"real time" analytics with an AI twist. Lots of data, need to provide instant decisions. Used by military among other industries
Re: (Score:1)
So, a scam.
Thanks.
Wut? (Score:2)
> the company is especially interested in candidates with experience in ... statistical analysis
So, the thiel bunch would have turned down Kolmogorov then, eh?
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Calling Kolmogorov experienced in statistical analysis is like saying that Gauss was good at using linear regression.
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I'm quite confident either of them would do better at statistical analysis than you or the the gifted amateurs from Palantir.
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w00sh. Thanks for sharing a piece of personal information about yourself.
Does it really count as dropping out (Score:5, Insightful)
If you've got rich parents and you know damn well you can just go right back?
So if my kid dropped out they'd be losing the post high school grants that we absolutely needed to afford getting them through college. So dropping out wasn't an option. They had one shot at college and they knew it and they knew if they blew it it was over and they were going to spend the rest of their lives driving Uber and working at Walmart.
If your parents are much much better off then my loser ass then that's not the case. You can take a year off and go travel Europe. You can spend some time getting contacts and take a chance starting a business and then if it doesn't work out, which should probably won't, you can go right back to college and get your degrees so you can get on with your life.
I say this because like a lot of things this bullshit is implying that something only a handful of people in extraordinary circumstances can do is a normal thing that we should all be expected to do. And they are doing that because they have nasty little ulterior motives. In this case they want to eliminate higher education for regular people because they don't like well-educated people. Well educated people don't do what they're told. And propaganda doesn't work as well on them if at all
Do you really believe (Score:3)
Do you really believe this:
"They had one shot at college and they knew it and they knew if they blew it it was over and they were going to spend the rest of their lives driving Uber and working at Walmart."
There are many ways to make a living so generalizing is unwise. My HS peers believed this and a fair number are in rough economic shape in retirement as their formerly valuable skills are too common globally to permit them to compete in an ageist reality.
OTOH my military contemporaries are generally doing
I'm guessing you're pretty old (Score:2)
I found that old people refuse to acknowledge that things have changed.
Wages are much lower than when we were kids and better paying jobs demand advanced degrees because they want to hire cheap labor from overseas because they can work them harder and pay them less.
This means that if you're a college bound kid your parents have just enough resources to help you through you get one single solitary shot through college. That's because once you drop out and start working you're never going to be able to
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The military is a very different set of circumstances and an equally consequential choice (With some very serious , potentially life-altering, downsides if you happen to get deployed into a hot war, as the Iraq and Afghanistan vets will tell you). And the benefit you get is likely to be the college opportunities offered to those who do service.
Thats not going to be an option for everyone who cant afford college. Some people dont have the physique (I sure as hell didn't, I was skinny short kid), some people
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> So if my kid dropped out they'd be losing the post high school grants that we absolutely needed to afford getting them through college. So dropping out wasn't an option. They had one shot at college and they knew it and they knew if they blew it it was over and they were going to spend the rest of their lives driving Uber and working at Walmart.
If they got a $100,000 grant for doing it, they could wait a few years until the grant was fully vested and couldn't be taken back, then use that $100,000 to pay for college at one of the smaller state universities and still have over $50k left over to spend on whatever.
I'm talking about the government grants (Score:2)
They were worth about $40,000. If you aren't continuously going to school you don't get them and if you have a break can't just reapply for them. We couldn't afford to lose $40,000. So my kid either finished college or they spent the rest of their lives without a college degree. Luckily things held together long enough for them to get through college. They certainly didn't have a lack of work ethic or focus but life has a tendency to kick my family when they're down.
I thought there was light at the end o
So no college, and they pay you for 4 months (Score:3)
... and then the "best" you can hope for is an interview?
It's pretty obvious they're not looking for the cream of the crop. Actually, it's pretty obvious this is basically just a stunt.
Re: So no college, and they pay you for 4 months (Score:2)
I'd probably have taken it . It's for kids. You have to be under 22. So , based on the world today , I'd be quite tempted to roll those dice if I was 22. If it doesn't lead to what you want , you are still young , pick up back where you left off. It appeals to ambitious people.
Re:So no college, and they pay you for 4 months (Score:4, Informative)
They pay you for four months and if they don't hire you full time you've got plenty of time to still go to college. Seems like a pretty good deal to me. If they DO hire you, then there's the question about whether that's the right move. On the one hand you replace 4 years of expense with 4 years of earning. On the other, lacking a degree could make it hard to change jobs in the future.
Statistical analysis experience? (Score:4, Interesting)
I was unaware that high schools taught statistical analysis. Or even statistics. I didn't get into that til my 2nd year of college. (Maybe third. Don't remember exactly.)
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
My high school taught statistics. That was back in the 80s though, before they had to make space for Bathroom Studies and similar things.
Re: Statistical analysis experience? (Score:3)
> before they had to make space for Bathroom Studies
. Dude, there was no official class for your cocaine habit.
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Good high schools have offered stats courses for ages. And for college-bound students, [1]AP Statistics [collegeboard.org] has been offered for almost 30 years now.
[1] https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-statistics
The IDF indoctrination is much better (Score:1)
And comes with AIPAC goodies.
Solely on merit, but not old (Score:2)
As an older developer, this raises my eyebrows.
so you can be like Elon Musk (Score:5, Insightful)
ignorant of history and human rights and lacking any understanding of the world except for your narrow, simple minded tech that you learned on the job.
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Reference: [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/White... [reddit.com]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/zoyp8r/ideas_stolen_by_elon_musk/#lightbox
Re:so you can be like Elon Musk (Score:4, Insightful)
This is part of Trump and his cronies attacking education. They want to enforce a right wing political bias [ think uncritical acceptance of Fox news narrative ]; education encourages people to observe, evaluate and think and results in many being left thinking. This is a treat to the Republicans in future elections which is why they want to stamp it out.
This, combined with attacks of free speech, cutting of funding for studies that do not fit in with Trump's narrow agenda, similar shuttering of parts of government and agencies, has many of the USA's brightest academics and researchers worried. The result could well be a brain drain of the best from the USA. Universities in Europe and elsewhere are already inviting job applications. The MAGA crowd will prolly rejoice at this [ they do not like facts and education ] but this will be bad for the USA long term, it will fall behind the rest of the world.
Hopefully the billionaire mafia will be thrown out of the White House in 4 years time and damage limited.
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Not just ignorant. This will create a class of narrowly educated people who are utterly dependent on Thiel and Palatir to keep themselves above minimum wage labor. Thiel is trying to create an corp of foot soldiers who will lack both the education and economic freedom to resist whatever evil he dreams up.
Building the next billionaire is (Score:5, Insightful)
NOT something that can be engineered. Climbing into the billionaire class requires a massive amount of sheer dumb luck. Being in the right place at the right time. Meeting the exact right people and saying exactly the right things to them. Taking a swing at the ball and knocking it out of the park a hundred times in a row. Even a genius cant make that happen without pure good luck. Billionaires dont like to think about this fact. This program will help people but not in the way Theil thinks it will. These people will take the money, fail at the business, and then go back to school as an older, wiser student. Older students in college tend to do WAY better than the 18-year-olds.
Honestly most of them are Nepo babies. (Score:4, Insightful)
The rest blundered into really really huge government contracts.
A lot of luck and a lot of talent might get you into the multimillionaire class but if you are going to get into the billionaire class you either need a ton of government money or you need lots of connections or both.
Seriously pick a couple of random billionaires and then dig into where they're fortune came from and that's what you'll find. Like the old saying goes never ask a man how he made his first billion. Then again remember when that phrase was never ask a man how he made his first million? And we're well on our way to trillions.
Maybe there is room for apprenticeship again (Score:1)
I've often thought of this in the context of graduate education. My opinion (confirmed by experience) is that people who get their BS and then move straight on to rack up additional credentials aren't really that complete when they come out the other side with a PhD and nothing else at age 26 or 27. Most of them choose this path by inertia rather than informed decisionmaking.
But it's the people who come back to do a master's or a PhD after some nontrivial amount of time in the workforce who are more valuabl
more jobs need the union apprenticeship system &am (Score:3)
more jobs need the union apprenticeship system & hiring hall.
If you have lots's of people that do temp projects better to have with an union system and not an rip off temp agency.
Re: more jobs need the union apprenticeship system (Score:1)
I doubt it. The unions have been trying to fit the round white collar peg fit into the blue collar model square hole since white collar became a thing. I don't think it will ever work because there is a difference between work that entails only following someone else's plan and work that entails coming up with the plan. Perhaps there is a chunk of the turn-the-crank stuff temps do that can fit that model but a lot of the vaguely worded "analyst" job titles are there for jobs with too amorphous of a job desc
Post-secondary should be free, as in beer (Score:3)
If Thiel believes in meritocracy then he should advocate for government-funded post-secondary education. Level the playing field by offering everyone the same education. There's no selection bias if everyone is selected.
But of course that's not what he believes, he simply wants his people to be the ones in charge of the opaque selection process.
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I think you will find that when university is free as in beer, it is rationed. There is not an unlimited amount of money or an unlimited number of places for students. Then, how and when are students selected for further education? In Germany, they generally decide each student's entire future at age 14 - gymnasium or not. Is that a good system?
So, we tax working class people to pay for the higher educations of students who have enough advantages by age 14 to win the meritocracy - in other words, not the wo
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There's a spot for everyone in elementary and high school; why stop there? Certainly a line has to be drawn somewhere but kicking kids out of school before they have any job skills is just bad policy. It's the US so clearly there will be haves and have-nots but the have-nots should at least get a college education imo.
4 months? (Score:2)
Go there for 4 months, earn 20k, then go to college anyway.
Two phrases that should make you grab your wallet (Score:2)
.....and run in the opposite direction:
1) "I wouldn't lie, I'm a christian"; and
2) Meritocracy.
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Exceptionally well said.
$5400 per month? (Score:2)
That's not only more than plenty of post-college internship programs, that's more than plenty of post-college full-time jobs that ask for a degree!
Palantir to the rescue! (Score:2)
No more being indoctrinated with quantum mechanics, solid state physics, synthetic biology, analytical chemistry or them high-faluttin' medical witchcraft. In fact, Palantir is saving us from the sort of indoctrination you get in law school that might make you compete with its founders and know their errors.
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I cloud tell you, but then I'd have to klil you...