For those of us who are disgusted by the many abuses of the universities—inflated grades, undercover DEI, biased admittance requirements, Marxist propaganda, and let’s not forget outrageous fees!—a new option is being offered by a successful company that is interested in hiring high school graduates without college degrees.

The company is Palantir.

Palantir has been much in the news due to its aggressive pursuit of government contracts and their subsequent success in being awarded them. But most impressive is that the company is taking a fairly new approach to hiring, which will bypass the university system:

Palantir launched a ‘Meritocracy Fellowship’ this week aimed at high schoolers or recent graduates who want to ‘get the Palantir Degree’ and ‘skip the debt’ and ‘indoctrination.’  The role(s) will be earned ‘solely on merit and academic excellence.’

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The four-month (Fall 2025) fellowship is ‘in response to the shortcomings of university admissions’ and pays $5,400 a month.

The job description says the role is in New York, New York, and the company ‘encourages employees to work from our offices,’ though its CEO reportedly often works from a barn in New Hampshire.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp spearheaded this program, after being dissatisfied with new college graduates in the hiring pool:

‘Everything you learned at your school and college about how the world works is intellectually incorrect,’ he said on CNBC’s Squawk Box in February. The internship was created, Palantir says in the posting, ‘in response to the shortcomings of university admissions.’ 

To offset the dearth of meaningful education in high school and at the university level, Palantir integrated certain topics into their training that might be considered unique in a corporate setting:

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.

But the company wants to know how these graduates will perform in real-world situations as well:

The first week with the teams—which Palantir intentionally set up as a trial by fire—proved difficult for all the fellows. Interns were put on live projects for customers in complex industries, from hospitals and insurance companies to defense industrials and even government work, in one fellow’s case. 

By week three or four, Palantir executives said they had a clear sense of who was working well in the company environment, and who wasn’t.

This new program at Palantir offers so many advantages for young people just out of high school. First, if they are inclined to learn about software engineering, artificial intelligence, product reliability, and product design, they may be able to get started as juniors, or in the last semester of their senior year. They will have the opportunity to work with experienced teams and get first-hand project experience. There is no guarantee they will be hired afterward, but the experience (beyond the $5,400 a month) will be priceless. And if they want to go to college afterward, nothing is stopping them.

Palantir does not have a position for every high school graduate, but they are offering an innovative and less expensive route than post-secondary education in a dynamic and growing company.

Perhaps other kinds of companies will follow their example and institute these kinds of incentives for interns and employment.

And the universities can pound sand.

Image: UK Government, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.