The article is not anti-college, it's against blindly going into college. Thiel is proposing that you decide what is the best for your future. If you want to build a company that provides ephemeral messaging and not much else, perhaps college isn't for you because there is little you can learn there that you can't learn on your own. If you want to build something that indexes large amounts of data in ways that were previously not doable, then college might be a good choice because you can do research and have your work reviewed by a community of people more interested in pushing the bounds of human knowledge than creating a business. My latter example would apply to a very small subset of existing companies.
The reality is that when you are at the stage of deciding whether you should do college, you have little idea of what it is that you want to do so it's difficult to reverse engineer your education against your potential career path. For this reason college seems like a good default. It's insurance (as was mentioned in the article, but in a different light) against realizing that your career path would benefit from a degree but you did not get one. It seems like a useful strategy may be to help young students discover their careers at an earlier age, or at least to enter the workforce before deciding whether college is for them.
The reality is that when you are at the stage of deciding whether you should do college, you have little idea of what it is that you want to do so it's difficult to reverse engineer your education against your potential career path. For this reason college seems like a good default. It's insurance (as was mentioned in the article, but in a different light) against realizing that your career path would benefit from a degree but you did not get one. It seems like a useful strategy may be to help young students discover their careers at an earlier age, or at least to enter the workforce before deciding whether college is for them.