The Meritocracy Fellowship doesn’t just challenge the status quo of higher education and the traditional college-to-career pipeline. According to the job description, it addresses what Palantir views as a crisis in higher education: “qualified students are being denied an education based on subjective and shallow criteria.” This anti-college stance is embodied by Palantir co-founders Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, who have each written books critiquing the American collegiate system. Thiel also has his own anti-college fellowship program.
There are certainly pros and cons when it comes to college. While many successful entrepreneurs have skipped college entirely, that’s not a hard-and-fast rule. College often provides structure and social development that can be hard to replicate outside of an academic environment. As this debate grows, it’s becoming clear that the best path may depend on the individual, and how well each path supports them in getting where they want to go.
Here’s what a few students — and former students — think about the pros and cons of Palantir’s Meritocracy Fellowship.
THE UNDERGRAD
Giovanni De Geronimo, a junior studying computer engineering at Purdue University, offers a perspective from inside the system. While he plans to pursue a PhD and finds much of his coursework relevant, he says the Palantir Meritocracy Fellowship would have been a serious consideration had it been available when he was applying to college in 2021.
What draws him most is the immediacy of impact. “In school, you’re usually learning concepts that are already a few years old … the cutting-edge material doesn’t make the curriculum for a while,” he said. “But a place like Palantir, I imagine they’re already applying it.”
THE GRADUATE
Izzy Mokotoff, a recent Northwestern graduate, is the co-founder of SteadyScrib, a writing utensil for people with Parkinson’s. For her, college wasn’t a detour from innovation, but rather a catalyst. She credits her university’s startup ecosystem, including mentorship, grant funding, and physical maker spaces, as essential to launching her company. As she puts it, “I think one of the best decisions I made with my life is to go to Northwestern.”
In addition, she says, the structured four-year experience helped her discover her professional direction and form connections she still values today. “I enjoyed that structure and I wanted that specific experience,” she says. “I don’t think I would’ve ever considered that sort of program for myself personally.”
THE DROPOUT
Kian Sadeghi, a 25-year-old entrepreneur and CEO of Nucleus Genomics, dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania after studying computational biology for a year and a half. His company, which has raised $32 million to date, analyzes a user’s DNA for variants that can impact their disease risks, and helps them understand those risks.
Sadeghi began building his company during the Covid-19 pandemic and raised early funding before being named a Thiel Fellowin 2023 — a $100,000 grant awarded to young people “who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom,” according to their website.
He said college wasn’t helping. “I found school stifling, and that the kind of institutionalization of education limited my potential and limited my joy and happiness,” he said. He described a startup as a kind of artistic pursuit that doesn’t fit well inside institutional walls.
Sadeghi says he sees value in skipping the academic track — that is, for the right person. “For some exceptional human beings, college is not necessary,” he said. But for those who don’t feel the same pull, he also realizes the value in staying. “If you know, you leave. And if you’re not sure, you should probably stay in college.”
Having this clarity early on is part of what makes Sadeghi supportive of bold alternatives like Palantir’s.
Yet not every student views their academic path as purely career prep. For some, college remains a vital social environment.
THE HIGH SCHOOLER
Zach Yadegari is the founder of Cal AI, a calorie tracking app venture he built in high school that he says now generates $30 million in annual recurring revenue. He recently went viral for criticizing the college admissions process after getting rejected from 15 of 18 schools he applied to.
Despite his frustration with the system, Yadegari still sees value in the social dimension of college, particularly the opportunity to meet ambitious, like-minded peers. “So that’s really the appeal … I’m not just looking for parties and fun,” he says. “It’s doing that with people that will become long-term, high-quality friends.”
In that sense, his motivations mirror Mokotoff’s. She says college made it easy to find new interests and make strong friendships, something that’s harder to do after graduating. “I’m hard-pressed to find avenues now that compare to what I had in college: to easily meet people and connect over a shared interest,” she adds.
When asked about the Meritocracy Fellowship, Yadegari says he’s skeptical. “In order to get one of these fellowships, you must have already accomplished something and demonstrated merit,” he says. He’d rather see a program that helps identify and nurture potential earlier.
Still, he’s not ruling the idea of a fellowship out. “I will likely end up dropping out and then applying to that,” he adds, referring to the Thiel Fellowship.
THE PRINCIPAL
Denver-based Palantir is most known for building data tools for government and defense agencies. Currently it’s making headlines for contracting with ICE to build a deportation tracker.
“Something that we’ve really found with the young people that have come to Palantir, is they’re coming for a product that works,” Head of Talent Margaret York told Inc. “They’re coming for the opportunity to do real work, but they’re also coming for people who will treat them like adults and who will not shelter them from challenging ideas, even if they’re not going to be inclined to agree with those challenging ideas.”
“Everything you learned at your school and college about how the world works is intellectually incorrect,” Palantir CEO and co-founder Alex Karp told CNBC in February. In his new book, The Technological Republic, Karp critiques higher education and elite American institutions as bloated, overrun with ideology, and increasingly irrelevant, arguing that the tech sector owes a moral debt to the country that enabled its rise.
The fellowship launches at a time of growing public skepticism toward higher education. A 2024 Gallup poll found that 32 percent of Americans have very little or no confidence in colleges and universities, up from 23 percent in 2023. Of those respondents, 41 percent cited political agendas, like indoctrination, and 30 percent cited that colleges “don’t teach relevant skills.”
THE HOMEWORK
For Inc. readers, the implications are that if Palantir’s hiring model proves effective, it could challenge longstanding assumptions about how talent is developed, as well as who gets access to it. It may inspire other companies to take similar risks and rethink their early-career hiring to get ahead of the competition.
But if these programs fall short because they offer too little support, or are burning out young hires, or failing to produce results, it’s not just the fellows who lose. Companies will have invested in a hiring pipeline that lacks structure. In the rush to reinvent the system, there’s a real risk of forgetting why some education systems exist in the first place.
©2025 Mansueto Ventures LLC; Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
