The Thiel Fellows, Forgoing College to Pursue Dreams

She isn’t doing any of that. Instead, Ms. Full, as bright and poised and ambitious as the next Ivy Leaguer, has done something extraordinary for a Princetonian: she has dropped out.

It wasn’t the exorbitant cost of college. (Princeton, all told, runs nearly $55,000 a year.) She says she simply received a better offer — and, perhaps, a shot at a better education.

Ms. Full, 20, is part of one of the most unusual experiments in higher education today. It rewards smart young people for not going to college and, instead, diving into the real world of science, technology and business.

The idea isn’t nuts. After all, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs dropped out, and they did O.K.

Of course, their kind of success is rare, degree or no degree. Mr. Gates and Mr. Jobs changed the world. Ms. Full wants to, as well, and she’s in a hurry. She has built a low-cost solar panel and is starting to test it in Africa.

“I was antsy to get out into the world and execute on my ideas,” she says.

At a time when the value of a college degree is being called into question, and when job prospects for many new graduates are grimmer than they’ve been in years, perhaps it’s no surprise to see a not-back-to-school movement spring up. What is surprising is where it’s springing up, and who’s behind it.

The push, which is luring a handful of select students away from the likes of Princeton, Harvard and M.I.T., is the brainchild of Peter H. Thiel, 44, a billionaire and freethinker with a remarkable record in Silicon Valley. Back in 1998, during the dot-com boom, Mr. Thiel gambled on a company that eventually became PayPal, the giant of online payments. More recently, he got in early on a little start-up called Facebook.

Since 2010, he has been bankrolling people under the age of 20 who want to find the next big thing — provided that they don’t look for it in a college classroom. His offer is this: $50,000 a year for two years, few questions asked. Just no college, unless a class is helpful for their Thiel projects.

A cool hundred grand, no strings attached? You won’t be shocked to learn that it is harder to get a Thiel Fellowship than it is to get into Princeton. Mr. Thiel (Stanford ’89, Stanford Law ’92) has grabbed headlines with his outlandish offer. Less has been said about the handful of plucky people who have actually managed to snag one of his fellowships in hopes of becoming the next Gates or Jobs. The first Thiel fellows are now in their second year of the program. Twenty new ones were selected this summer.

Applications for 2013 are not yet being accepted; the due date will be posted this fall at ThielFellowship.org. Candidates must be under 20 when they apply. The final step is straight out of Silicon Valley: applicants get two and a half minutes to pitch their ideas to would-be mentors, most of them successful entrepreneurs.

A CNBC documentary about the fellowship, “20 Under 20: Transforming Tomorrow,” was broadcast this summer, and showed the range of those pitches. One young woman proposed a novel curriculum for students overseas and apologized for being flustered at the podium. Another ignored the instructions and spoke from the middle of the stage, TED-style. Then they and the others waited for would-be mentors in the audience to ask more questions.

Over the last two years, 44 Thiel fellows have been chosen after layers of reviews by 15 to 20 people. They don’t exactly represent a cross-section of the nation. Most of these young people are white or Asian, and men. Only four are women. Applications have come in from 42 countries, from Bhutan to Ethiopia to Guatemala, but only six fellows have been selected from outside the United States — four from Canada, one from Britain and one from Russia. A quarter of applicants apply directly from high school or home schooling.

MS. FULL was studying mechanical engineering at Princeton when she applied, hoping to develop a hardy, low-cost solar panel that follows the sun’s path. She calls it the SunSaluter. She is starting to test the latest iteration in Kirindi, Uganda, and Karagwe, Tanzania.

She left Princeton after her sophomore year, and she says the learning curve has been steep.

“I spent the first year of the fellowship learning a lot about the solar industry, what it takes to get a product to market, what I’m good at,” she says. “The timing was perfect.”

But testing the SunSaluter in Kenya, as she did earlier, offered unexpected lessons. Local children played with it, trying to unscrew the bolts. And Ms. Full, who is Asian-Canadian, was an object of fascination in villages.

“In the real world,” she says, “you don’t know what’s going to happen.”

She has had to learn to depend on the cooperation of strangers — no small feat for a woman who is used to talking fast and moving faster.

“One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is you have to be pretty flexible,” she says. “Some days, I just want to go back to college.”