At first, the idea of skipping college to take a fellowship for Palantir PLTR 3.04% Technologies seemed preposterous to Matteo Zanini. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it.
“College is broken,” one Palantir post said. “Admissions are based on flawed criteria. Meritocracy and excellence are no longer the pursuits of educational institutions,” it said. The fellowship offered a path for high-school students to work full time at the company.
After deciding to apply, Zanini found out he got the fellowship at around the same time he learned of his admission to Brown University. Brown wouldn’t allow him to defer and he had also landed a full-ride scholarship through the Department of Defense.
“No one said to do the fellowship,” said Zanini, who turned 18 in September. “All of my friends, my teachers, my college counselor, it was a unanimous no.” His parents left the decision to him, and he decided to go with Palantir.
Matteo Zanini, a Palantir fellow.
Zanini is one of more than 500 high-school graduates who applied for Palantir’s “Meritocracy Fellowship”—an experiment launched under Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s thesis that existing American universities are no longer reliable or necessary for training good workers.
Some fellows applied because college wasn’t interesting to them. Others applied after getting rejected from target schools.
Palantir is a data-analytics company that has become known lately for its government contracts, including with the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. Its work with immigration enforcement authorities and in other arenas has drawn criticism, but Karp and other executives have leaned into a pro-America ethos. The company also has many commercial clients.
Karp—who studied philosophy at Haverford College and got a law degree from Stanford University—said in an August earnings call that hiring university students these days has meant hiring people who have “just been engaged in platitudes.”
The inaugural class of 22 Palantir fellows wraps up in November. If they’ve done well in the four-month program, they’ll have the chance to work full time at Palantir, sans college degree.
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.
“We felt obligated to provide more than the average internship,” said Jordan Hirsch, a senior counselor who works with Karp on special projects, including this program. “They’re really still kids, right?”
Fellowship participants take part in a debate led by Palantir’s Jordan Hirsch and Sam Feldman at the company’s New York City office.
The interns’ inexperience showed early on: One fellow asked Hirsch how to take notes during the seminars. “He mostly did math and coding and was never too engaged in history courses,” Hirsch said. “He said he’d never taken a note in his life.”
Questions the company hoped the seminars would answer for the fellows included: What is the West? What are its challenges and how do we think through them? And, perhaps most important, is the West worth defending?—which Palantir sought to answer in the affirmative.
The fellows read the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, took an improv-themed class on how to think on one’s feet and present oneself in the workplace, and went on field trips, including to the site of the Civil War’s Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. While they were there, the students learned of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’sassassination.
“It was very poignant to be brought back to that time two centuries ago when there was so much political contention, and then seeing it pop up again on that day,” said Aryan Mehra, a fellow who grew up near San Francisco. “I don’t think any of us expected that.”
Aryan Mehra, a Palantir fellow.
Gideon Rose, a former editor of Foreign Affairs magazine and an adjunct assistant professor at Barnard College, said his course for Palantir fellows didn’t involve ideological or politically partisan perspectives. Instead, he focused on introductory international relations.
One fellow asked Rose whether he thought it was a good professional bet for people to skip college and go straight into the workforce. “It wouldn’t be for most people,” Rose recalled answering. “It could be for some people. That’s their choice to make.”
After the seminars, the interns embedded themselves in teams within Palantir, often traveling all across the country with other “forward-deployed engineers”—a job title coined by Palantir that has spread to other startups. These engineers operate much like consultants, traveling to where the clients are.
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.
The company hasn’t decided which of the 22 fellows will get full-time offers. Some of the fellows would like to stay, even if it’s against the wishes of their parents.
Interns who do well in the fellowship are offered a full-time role at Palantir.
“It’s been a source of conflict between me and my parents,” said Zanini. His mother was under the impression that he would do the fellowship as a gap year, and then reapply to return to college. But if he gets a full-time offer, that might no longer be the case.
Part of the appeal, says Zanini, is the company mission and the surprising amount of work and control he has been given, despite his inexperience in the workforce. “I mean, what company puts people on real projects on their third day?” said Zanini. “That’s insane.”
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It’s also possible some might turn down Palantir’s offer to stay, and instead reapply for college, said Sam Feldman, another Palantir employee who helped manage the program with Hirsch.
“But I’m going to guess that whether they stay or leave, you’ll have zero who end up in investment banking or consulting,” said Feldman. “They’ve tasted what it’s like to build and have agency.”
