Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
What do Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison
have in common? They all made billions of dollars in
technology. And they all left college. Now, a
wealthy businessman is paying other technologically
talented young people to follow that same path.
Peter Thiel is paying them to drop out or at least
to "stop out" of higher education temporarily to
work on their interests. He and his Thiel Foundation
have announced the first group of what they call 20
Under 20 Thiel Fellows. He says: "We selected people
on the basis of a combination of having demonstrated
intense passion about science and technology and
then having the drive to try to carry it forward in
the years ahead." There are twenty-four people to be
exact, because a couple of projects involve more
than one person. One of the youngest is Laura
Deming. At twelve she began researching ways to
extend human life. Now, at seventeen, she has
already graduated from the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. Eighteen-year-old John Marbach just
finished high school. He hopes to use Web tools to
bring classrooms into the digital age. He plans to
attend one semester of college before he begins his
fellowship. Each of the fellows will receive one
hundred thousand dollars over two years to continue
their research. They will also receive help from
experts. Peter Thiel has a lot of experience with
technology start-up businesses. He helped create the
electronic payment system PayPal. He was also one of
the first investors in Facebook. He himself is a
graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Law
School in California. But Mr. Thiel says college has
gotten a lot more expensive than when he attended
school twenty-five years ago. "You now have people
graduating with a quarter million dollars worth of
debt and they end up having to spend years or
decades paying the debt off." The Obama
administration is pushing college. It says over the
next ten years, nearly half of all new jobs will
require more than a high school education. But Peter
Thiel says many young people choose college for the
wrong reasons. "Talented, high school, what do you
do? You go to college. Good in college, what do you
do? You go to law school ... Higher education
becomes almost this way for not thinking and
avoiding thinking about what you're going to do with
your life." He says the young people he is investing
in will, at the very least, gain experience to take
back to school if that is what they decide to do.
For VOA Special English, I'm Alex Villarreal.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
