In Silicon Valley, “meritocracy” is the gospel of efficiency, the creation myth of the self-made. But one of its own temples of worship, Palantir Technologies, has rewritten the liturgy. Its CEO, Alex Karp, and its president, Peter Thiel, have unveiled the Meritocracy Fellowship—an experiment inviting twenty-two high-school seniors to skip college altogether. “Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination. Get the Palantir degree,” the slogan declares. No student loans, no professors, no campus life—just four weeks of seminars on Western civilization, from Plato to Tocqueville, followed by an internship amid Palantir’s algorithms.
The fellowship, open only to exceptional students who pledge not to enroll in an accredited college the following fall, pays roughly $5,400 a month. The message could hardly be clearer—or colder: higher education is obsolete, learning is a waste of time, what matters is knowing how to perform. It’s not only a provocation; it’s a political act. Palantir, whose empire runs on data and artificial intelligence, isn’t just recruiting talent; it’s shaping the future of education as a battlefield between freedom and economic power.
Its model combines a fast-track humanistic crash course with immediate technical immersion, privileging functional training over the liberal arts that once defined the Western university. The goal is to forge hyper-efficient operators—cogs polished to perfection—ready to serve the company’s clients, often government or security agencies.
The goal is to forge hyper-efficient operators—cogs polished to perfection—ready to serve the company’s clients.
The stakes are enormous. Across the United States, the idea that education is—or should be—a private market commodity has taken hold. The blows dealt to academia during the Trump years were symptoms, not causes, of a deeper shift. American universities face mounting tuition costs, a staggering $1.7 trillion in student debt, and accusations of ideological bias and irrelevance to the labor market. Into that climate strides the Meritocracy Fellowship, promising a quick, low-cost escape from what it calls the “debt trap.” In this new paradigm, the acquisition of skills replaces personal formation—competence displaces character.
And yet, in Rome, another voice has begun to answer back. Pope Leo XIV—the first American to occupy the papal throne—recently released an apostolic letter titled “Drawing New Maps of Hope,” inaugurating the Jubilee of Education. His words read like a counter-melody to Silicon Valley’s techno-pragmatism. Reviving the “Global Compact on Education” launched by his predecessor Francis, Leo XIV lays out three priorities: interior life, technology, and peace. “The educator,” he writes, “is not a technician of learning but a witness of humanity.” The student is not a cog; education, Leo insists, is a constellation that binds heart, mind, and hands. Education, for him, is another name for peace—because it teaches us to appreciate differences and to grow in dialogue.
On one side, then, stands the dazzling shortcut of learning by doing, the promise of immediate success and measurable output. On the other, the slower faith in a process that ripens through error, encounter, and time. Here enters St. John Henry Newman, whom Leo XIV has declared a Doctor of the Church and co-patron of educators alongside Thomas Aquinas. Newman had already diagnosed the modern confusion. In his masterpiece The Idea of a University, he warned that to reduce education to the mere acquisition of skills was to betray its soul. Knowledge, he wrote, is valuable not because it “produces” something, but because it trains the freedom of the human spirit. Liberal knowledge, in Newman’s sense, isn’t an end in itself—it clears the mind, untangles thought, teaches one to see things as they are. It prepares a person not for a trade, but for a life. Its purpose, as he said, is to form the gentleman, not the businessman.
Between Palo Alto and Rome, then, two gospels of learning now face each other: one of speed and efficiency, the other of depth and discernment. The question that lingers is which one will educate the soul of the century to come.
Reproduced with permission by Commonweal.
