Michel Gibson was on the road to a career in the academic world. He was about to begin a Ph.D. program in philosophy at Oxford, when he realized that a professorship wouldn’t give him the freedom for deep, independent thinking and writing he longed for. He began to think deeply and independently about what has happened to American higher education and came to the radical conclusion that it’s a big waste of time, money, and talent. He blames it for the slowdown of innovation.
Plenty of people complain about our ineffectual education system, but Gibson is actually challenging it. He has created the 1517 Fund, which invests in young people who have ideas and ambition. Gibson helps them to get business ventures off the ground with startup financing—but the deal is that the recipients must either have dropped out of college or never enrolled at all.