Hey, seniors! Stressed about Common App essays and EA/ED deadlines? Finding yourself asking, “Why even go to college?” Well, if you think college is for opening doors to job opportunities afterward, you’re in luck! Ready up your SAT 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. Simply work hard, and you could have a permanent job at Palantir, one of the world’s 25 most valuable companies, while your high school classmates are taking their Biology 101 exams. Besides, as Karp tells us, “Everything you learned at your school and college about how the world works is intellectually incorrect.”
On a serious note, please don’t. Two reasons. First, while you may be bored in U.S. History or a massive freshman calculus lecture after your time at the Upper School, you’re picking up valuable soft skills. How do you work effectively with peers? Teachers? Bosses? Besides, as Harvard economist David Deming P ’27 warns, “What’s good for the company isn’t always what’s best for employees.” Palantir’s game is one you’ll lose, which brings me to my second reason you shouldn’t even consider this internship: Who are you even working for?
A glance at Palantir’s website mentions “AI-powered automation for every decision.” Sounds a lot like every other AI data company out there. Most people know of their wildly successful stock, which grew by 340% in 2024. However, the age-old question remains: What does Palantir actually do?
Conceived in the wake of the Sept. 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 The Wall Street Journal. For example, Palantir supplies advanced AI targeting technologies to the Israeli Defense Force for urban warfare planning.
“When it comes to working for Palantir as a bright, young 18-year-old, if your life goals are to make a positive change in the world, perhaps it’d be best to stay in school.”
Who are other such clients? There’s Walmart, 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 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 upend an innocent person’s life.
The pilot of the aforementioned fellowship has led to high school graduates forgoing or deferring admission to Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn, per Business Insider. A head start in the Silicon Valley world is simply too much to turn down, despite any ethical quandaries. So, when it comes to working for Palantir as a bright, young 18-year-old, if your life goals are to make a positive change in the world, perhaps it’d be best to stay in school. No amount of money, stock options or prestige is worth creating a world that you don’t want to live in.
