Initial perspectives Initially, Thiel's announcement of the Fellowship met with diverse responses. Some, such as
Jacob Weisberg, criticized Thiel's proposal for its
utopianism and attack on the importance of
education. Others, such as academic
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 first Thiel Fellows were named, the admissions office at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) congratulated two of its students for receiving the Fellowship; both MIT students would, the blog stated, be able to return to MIT to resume studies after completing the two-year fellowship if they desired. A year after first Fellows were named, opinions on the program ranged from the skeptical and critical to the laudatory and optimistic. In 2012, Eric Markowitz offered a mixed review of the Thiel Fellowship in
Inc. magazine. In 2013 the program attracted criticism for its limited results. In April, an article by Richard Nieva for
PandoDaily took a close look at how the first batch of Thiel Fellows had fared, finding that some had succeeded and others planned to return to school in the fall once their two years were up. In September,
Vivek Wadhwa wrote that the Fellowship had failed to produce notable successes to date, and its limited successes were instances where its Fellows were collaborating with experienced individuals. Also in October, former
Harvard University President
Larry Summers, speaking at
The Nantucket Project conference, said: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. Thiel Fellow Dan Friedman, also a mentor for the Fellowship, published an October 2013
op-ed response, restating in
TechCrunch the Fellowship's thesis, and arguing that
liberal arts education was becoming less relevant. In a supportive December 2013
Wall Street Journal article, the Thiel Fellowship and its recipient's accomplishements were summarized, up to that point, in this way: "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." Thiel's biographer Max Chafkin notes that in the early days, Thiel mismanaged the fellows, showing favoritism and gave them unqualified staff with zero structure, leading to many fellows feeling like failures, followed by mental health issues and drug abuse.
Longer term perspectives In October 2023, the
Washington Post reported that: "Eleven of the 271 recipients of the Thiel Fellowship have founded unicorns so far, an impressive accomplishment that doesn’t even take into account the inspiring innovations of other fellows and the many exciting projects yet to mature." The Fellowship's website counts 26 unicorns. In a 2025 op-ed article for
Bloomberg, finance researchers Aaron Brown and Richard Dewey remarked that despite early criticisms, the fellowship had achieved "shocking success", and not only finance-wise. The researchers named Laura Deming,
Chris Olah and Boyan Slat as examples of fellows who had formed networks and infrastructure to develop science and technology. Regarding entrepreneurs, the researchers pointed out that other scholarships were also designed to identify high-potential students and offered networks of powerful people that Thiel arguably could not match, yet "All of them put together can’t match the kind of entrepreneurial success before age 35 of Thiel fellows" and that entrepreneurial institutes and incubators organized by colleges did not produce this kind of success too. They concluded that "Thiel has not proven that college is bad for everyone, nor that post-secondary education in the US is a dismal failure. But he has demonstrated a competing idea that has been vastly more successful, if only for a few students and only for certain types of projects." Back in 2013,
Alexis Ohanian made the criticism that the program was not scalable: "There are two problems with Thiel’s education solution. First, the Thiel Fellowship isn’t scalable. Helping 20 kids a year is great, but more than 21 million students enroll in college each year, so the Thiel Fellowship is only helping less than 0.00000095 percent of students. The second problem is that giving a select number of students the option of going to college or getting $100,000 to work on a business creates a false and harmful dichotomy". In a 2019 interview with
Eric Weinstein, Thiel himself recognized that the Thiel Fellowship was not scalable. Nevertheless, Thiel and companies associated with him have offered other alternative education programs. From April 2025,
Palantir Technologies has offered Palantir Meritocracy Fellowship, which gives high school graduates a four-month internship and a chance at full-time employment in exchange for skipping or delaying college enrollment (The motto is "Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination. Get the Palantir Degree.").
TheStreet remarks that the company is taking a page out of its founder's playbook. The
Founders Fund is the major backer of Campus, a startup established by Tade Oyerinde to create an online alternative to traditional community colleges. Campus hires adjunct professors currently teaching at colleges like
Princeton,
NYU and
Vanderbilt, paying them $8,000 a course, while offering students a laptop, Wi-Fi and tutoring. The Founders Fund's
Trae Stephens has called the project "Thiel Fellowship for the masses". Sam Altman also backs the project. Fabian Gruber, a Fellow whose startup Manex AI is already developed and sells software to
BMW,
Audi,
Heinkel,
Stellantis and others, said that he was not interested in the grant itself, but decided to join because of the ecosystem, with exciting people working on real problems. Commenting on the case of Manex AI, the German tech site
IT-Boltwise notes that Thiel helps startups not only with financial resources, but also contacts and strategic support. ==Recipients==