Thiel fellowship should compete head on with Harvard. Backing up: Thiel Fellowship was started with the intent to show that you could get 20 kids a year to drop out of school and that they would be more successful as a result. It's clearly been a runaway success and the results of the fellows speak for themselves (Figma, Ethereum, etc etc etc). But it's outlived its purpose in its current form: A decade in, the fellowship has already proven it can pick ~20 kids a year and they'll go onto do amazing things. Now what. Go bigger. Despite its success, it hasn't really changed the higher education landscape: 99% of the top talent still go to Harvard, Stanford, etc. The fellowship may have helped show that the emperor (academia) has no clothes, but it hasn't replaced it with anything. It's been more sustaining than disruptive. Harvard especially is proving itself to be captured, but it has no new competition. We keep saying these universities will fail on their own (they won't), or that we won't need universities anymore, but that's not true either. Unless there's direct competition, the top kids will continue to attend Harvard etc for the next decade at least. Instead of trying to get 20 kids every year, The Thiel Fellowship should try to get 2,000 a year and get a big chunk of the kids that would otherwise get indoctrinated at Stanford/Harvard. *That* would be truly disruptive. The Thiel Fellowship is the only competitor that can credibly say it’s a better career option for kids interested in technology than going to Stanford or Harvard, given the alumni and success stories. UATX and Minerva and the like are amazing and impactful efforts, but they can't definitively say that the same way TF can, and that's why they can't compete head to head with Harvard (yet). The fellowship is by far the best option, which is why it has to be them. Ironically, Thiel fellows likely wouldn't want this to happen for the same reason Harvard students don't want to expand their class size: it weakens the signal. Doing this would ruin what the fellowship is today in order to build something bigger, something disruptive instead of sustaining. An actual university instead of a fellowship. For the next decade at least, top talent will be going to universities, Harvard specifically. If you don't want 99% of the future elite to be indoctrinated at ideologically captured schools, you need to build an alternative.