Palantir Technologies has made headlines, announcing it would bypass traditional college recruiting and directly hire high school graduates through a new initiative they’ve coined the “Meritocracy Fellowship.”
The company invited dozens of teens, 22 were selected from more than 500 applicants, to skip college and begin working immediately, starting with an intensive four-week seminar before jumping into full-fledged projects.
The fellowship begins with a four-week course covering Western civilization, U.S. history, and the ideas behind key historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Frederick Douglass. After that, participants are placed on live teams working on real projects — spanning the company’s defense, healthcare, and data analytics clients. For the top candidates, the fellowship can lead to full-time employment.
Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, has said that American universities are “broken”, failing to deliver meaningful skills, emphasizing conformity over originality, and saddling students with debt while offering little guarantee of job-ready training. For him, the “Palantir degree,” earned through hands-on experience and aptitude, is more valuable than a diploma from a traditional four-year institution.
Palantir’s move is similar to earlier efforts such as the Thiel Fellowship, which for more than a decade has encouraged talented young people to skip or leave college to work on entrepreneurial or technical projects. (RELATED: Derek Chauvin Files New Petition Claiming Constitutional Violations in George Floyd Trial)
Soaring tuition costs, growing student debt burdens, and the gap between what colleges teach and what employers actually need are all growing. A study from Cornell into “skill-based hiring” finds that many tech and green-energy jobs no longer demand formal degrees. Instead valuing specialized, demonstrable skills that can be taught via apprenticeships, bootcamps, or on-the-job training.
Critics believe it remains unclear whether a short fellowship and early-career immersion can substitute for a college education. However the state of radicalization in universities has reached a tipping point. Universities have now grown to require more courses un-related to students’ respective major, contributing to the lack of experience that employers are referring to.