“If you are the kind of person that would’ve gone to Yale, classically high IQ, and you have generalized knowledge but it’s not specific, you’re effed,” Karp recently said in an interview with Axios. “There’s some schools you maybe should go to, otherwise, go to the cheapest school and come to Palantir—or just come here.”

The CEO conceded he picked on Yale because he has family members there—and actually it’s one of the few colleges he says students should attend, aside from Stanford University. But his general sentiment is simply attending an elite U.S. college isn’t a one-way ticket to success. It echoes his many assertions higher education is no longer a reliable training ground for the next cohort of movers and shakers; earlier this year, Palantir even launched its Meritocracy Fellowship to sway high school students away from attending college and work at the $439 billion defense tech company instead. 

In this shaky labor market, Karp says he believes Ivy League degree-holders won’t always be the ones achieving greatness. Instead, it’ll be those who have specific domain knowledge—those who ask questions like, “How do I impute the problem in this complicated device that’s going wrong, that otherwise would be fixed by a Japanese engineer, while being a high school grad?”

“Those people are going to make a lot more money, specifically because you can turn it any way you want,” Karp explained. “Within a relatively rapid amount of time, you will get paid downstream of the value you create.”

The Meritocracy Fellowship and Karp’s disdain for elite colleges

The leader of Palantir—a tech company that’s faced controversy over providing software for ICE and running data analytics for the U.S. Army—has long slammed higher education for not preparing students for the real world. 

“Everything you learned at your school and college about how the world works is intellectually incorrect,” Karp told CNBC in an interview earlier this year.

Even when assessing what talent to hire for his own company, he doesn’t care if applicants attended a prestigious university. He says he believes working at Palantir is the top-notch qualification to put on resumes in the tech world, and is even recruiting teenagers to join his operation. 

“If you did not go to school, or you went to a school that’s not that great, or you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantirian—no one cares about the other stuff,” Karp said during the business’ Q2 2025 earnings call. “This is by far the best credential in tech. If you come to Palantir, your career is set.”

In expressing his devotion to sway budding talent away from “indoctrinating” colleges, Palantir commenced its Meritocracy Fellowship this April. The four-month, paid internship is aimed at recent high school graduates who are not already enrolled in college. The program required Ivy League-level test scores to qualify, and attracted more than 500 applicants, with only 22 Gen Zers making the cut.

“Opaque admissions standards at many American universities have displaced meritocracy and excellence,” the fellowship posting said. “As a result, qualified students are being denied an education based on subjective and shallow criteria. Absent meritocracy, campuses have become breeding grounds for extremism and chaos.”

During their stint, the pupils learned about U.S. history and foundations of the West, working alongside Palantir’s full-time employees in solving technical problems and improving products. The fellows will wrap the program this month after choosing to forgo their undergraduate degrees—and those who “excelled” will be given the chance to interview for a full-time job at the business.