It’s a startup shibboleth that entrepreneurship and formal education don’t mix. For icons such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, so goes the lore, finishing a bachelor’s degree would have only stifled the creativity that fueled their companies to stratospheric success. PayPal founder Peter Thiel offers a $100,000 fellowship to “young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.” Graduate degrees are thought to merely exacerbate the problem of too much thinking, too little doing.
