Palantir thinks college might be a waste. It's higher high school grads?

Listen, we've been doing this for years. Personally, I never made it past the 7th grade and most of our reporting staff barely made it out of middle school. The school of hard knocks is all I know. BTW, I'm the guy with the blue shirt on the left.

And Palantir? I bet you don't know what those sons of bitches do. A bunch of AI and data whatever for the Federal Government. Their involved with the Defense Dept, ICE, various intelligence agencies. Exactly, a bunch of rudderless spooks!

From the Wall St Journal this am.

Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It’s Hiring High-School Grads.

Tech company offers 22 teens a chance to skip college for its fellowship, which includes a four-week seminar on Western civilization

Palantir’s new “Meritocracy Fellowship” attracted over 500 high school graduates, with 22 selected for the inaugural class.

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At first, the idea of skipping college to take a fellowship for Palantir PLTR 3.04%increase; green up pointing triangle Technologies seemed preposterous to Matteo Zanini. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

“College is broken,” one Palantir post said. “Admissions are based on flawed criteria. Meritocracy and excellence are no longer the pursuits of educational institutions,” it said. The fellowship offered a path for high-school students to work full time at the company.

After deciding to apply, Zanini found out he got the fellowship at around the same time he learned of his admission to Brown University. Brown wouldn’t allow him to defer and he had also landed a full-ride scholarship through the Department of Defense.

“No one said to do the fellowship,” said Zanini, who turned 18 in September. “All of my friends, my teachers, my college counselor, it was a unanimous no.” His parents left the decision to him, and he decided to go with Palantir.

Zanini is one of more than 500 high-school graduates who applied for Palantir’s “Meritocracy Fellowship”—an experiment launched under Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s thesis that existing American universities are no longer reliable or necessary for training good workers.

Some fellows applied because college wasn’t interesting to them. Others applied after getting rejected from target schools.

Palantir is a data-analytics company that has become known lately for its government contracts, including with the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. Its work with immigration enforcement authorities and in other arenas has drawn criticism, but Karp and other executives have leaned into a pro-America ethos. The company also has many commercial clients.

Karp—who studied philosophy at Haverford College and got a law degree from Stanford University—said in an August earnings call that hiring university students these days has meant hiring people who have “just been engaged in platitudes.”

The inaugural class of 22 Palantir fellows wraps up in November. If they’ve done well in the four-month program, they’ll have the chance to work full time at Palantir, sans college degree.

The fellowship kicked off with a four-week seminar with more than two dozen speakers. Each week had a theme: the foundations of the West, U.S. history and its unique culture, movements within America, and case studies of leaders including Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill.

This was a surprise to the fellows, who were given little information about the program before they started.

“We felt obligated to provide more than the average internship,” said Jordan Hirsch, a senior counselor who works with Karp on special projects, including this program. “They’re really still kids, right?”

The interns’ inexperience showed early on: One fellow asked Hirsch how to take notes during the seminars. “He mostly did math and coding and was never too engaged in history courses,” Hirsch said. “He said he’d never taken a note in his life.”