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 changed.

PETER THIEL: "It's gotten a lot more expensive than when I attended school a quarter of a century ago. And so, if you look at how much college costs have gone up, 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.

PETER THIEL: "What I ended up doing, and what I think is still true of most of my peers and is true of most people today -- was simply to default into it. Talented, high school, what do you do? You go to college. Good in college, what do you do? You go to law school. Where education and higher education becomes almost this way for not thinking and avoiding thinking about what you’re going to do with your life."

Mr. Thiel says the young people he is investing in are clear about what they want to do. At the very least, he says, they will gain experience to take back to school if that is what they decide to do.