If you could forgo college for big bucks in Silicon Valley, would you do it?
High school seniors stress about Common App essays and EA/ED deadlines. That’s a fact plainly visible across school districts in America. At some point along the trek to January, many will question why they even subject themselves to weekends of drafting, editing, re-writing, and re-editing 250-word snippets of their personality. Some go to college for the experience: the people they’ll meet and the memories they’ll make. Others go for the degree: the professional doors the next four years will open and the job opportunities that await afterwards. For high-achieving 18-year-olds in the second category, Palantir offers a solution. Ready up a 99th percentile test score and apply for the Palantir Meritocracy Fellowship!
“Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination,” Alex Karp, billionaire CEO of the Silicon Valley tech company that created the internship, says. Skip college. Skip the ambiguous application process. Simply work hard, and one could have a permanent job at Palantir, one of the world’s 25 most valuable companies, while their high school classmates are frittering away on their Biology midterms. Besides, as Karp claims, “Everything you learned at your school and college about how the world works is intellectually incorrect.”
On a serious note, please don’t. Working for Palantir isn’t worth it. Two reasons. First, while students may find themselves bored in AP U.S. History or a 300-person calculus lecture during their first year of college, they’re picking up valuable soft skills. How does one work effectively with peers? Teachers? Bosses? Besides, as Harvard economist David Deming warns, “What’s good for the company isn’t always what’s best for employees.” Simply put, Palantir’s game is one that the teenager will lose. That, however, also begs the question: Who are you even working for?
A glance at Palantir’s website mentions “AI-powered automation for every decision.” That’s unhelpful. In the age of artificial intelligence, “AI-powered automation” is the mantra of every new startup. Most people, however, do know of Palantir’s wildly successful stock, which grew by 340% in 2024. However, the age-old question remains: What does Palantir actually do? And why are they earning so much money from it?
Conceived in the wake of the September 11 attacks, Palantir was created by Karp and Peter Thiel to provide national security and surveillance efforts with AI technology. The company deals primarily in government defense contracts and, to a lesser extent, commercial contracts, per Sharon Weinberger of the Wall Street Journal.
There’s another use according to Karp, however, who boasts that “Our product is used, on occasion, to kill people.” This overlaps significantly with Palantir’s extensive involvement in global conflict. For example, Palantir supplies advanced AI targeting technologies to the Israeli Defense Force for urban warfare planning.
Who are other such partners of Palantir? There’s retail chain Walgreen’s, fast-food restaurant Wendy’s and oh, ICE, as well. Palantir’s work with the latter on an “ImmigrationOS” surveillance platform promises the agency “near real-time visibility” of migrants moving from the border to various communities around the country.
Domestically, the LAPD has also signed on with Palantir for the use of predictive policing and surveillance technologies. Watching a demo of a Palantir engineer searching for a hypothetical suspect who drove a black sedan, sociologist Sarah Brayne reports that during the narrowing-down process from 140 million records to 13 people, assumptions were made about the year the car was made and the suspect’s build. When asked about whether these leaps created potential for false positives, the Palantir employee purportedly responded, “I don’t know.”
The stakes are too high to “not know.” After all, each data point Palantir tracks and delivers to clients represents a real, living human being. A false positive on the part of Palantir’s surveillance tech could mean wrongful detainment and upend an innocent person’s life. In May, 13 former employees condemned the company’s trajectory in an open letter: “Early Palantirians understood the ethical weight of building these technologies. These principles have now been violated and are rapidly being dismantled.” In short, the company’s surging share price isn’t exactly built on the honest operations of a mom-and-pop shop.
Returning to the pilot of the aforementioned Meritocracy Fellowship, the inaugural iteration has spurred high school graduates to defer enrollment at elite schools such as Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia, and Penn. To them, despite any ethical quandaries or moral uneasiness, the prospect of a head-start in Silicon Valley is simply too lucrative to turn down. When it comes to working for Palantir as a bright, young 18-year-old, though, if one’s life goals are to make a positive change in the world, perhaps it’d be best to stay in school. The entry-level job market may be poor, but no sum of money, stock options, LinkedIn connections, and prestige is worth creating a world that you don’t want to live in.
