With the Ivy League under fire — from AI, from Trump, from its own students — it may finally be enough for young people to consider alternative paths. At least, that’s the argument at Palantir Technologies.

Last week, the company announced a new “Meritocracy Fellowship,” a four-month internship for high school graduates. Candidates will be selected “based solely on merit and academic excellence” in contrast to the opaque standards that govern admission to prestigious universities. While modern American culture denies kids can be extremely competent change agents, Palantir — in keeping with its culture of betting on “aptitude over skill” — wants to give them a shot.

Whether or not high schoolers are emotionally ready for corporate life, the option itself may present an overdue challenge to the Ivy League, which has coasted on prestige for one too many centuries. In this interview with Palantir Head of Talent, Margaret (“Marge”) York, who’s been at the company since 2012, we discuss higher ed’s dysfunction, Palantir’s belief in young people, and how that belief has shaped the company’s talent pool.

The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.

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Blake Dodge: How did you come to see college students as potential hires, and where did the idea for the Meritocracy Fellowship come from?

Marge York: Unfortunately, October 7th, 2023 was really — certainly for us internally at the company (and I’m based in New York, so in New York too) — a cataclysmic event. It touched tons of our employees personally, so many of our friends. There was just this intense sense of: We have to do something. And then how quickly the unrest in the Middle East — especially as it showed up on college campuses here — took hold in the U.S. It surprised all of us.

My friends and coworkers who went to Columbia, their jaws dropped. These were not the colleges we recognized. Not the experiences we recognized. And we were hearing from friends and siblings still on campus — this is not the place they want to be right now.

From a philosophical and principled perspective, we were like: We’ve got to take a stand here. We’ve got to be a place where these people can go. And so that program — Safe Haven — really unfolded overnight. Karp launched it via tweet in December 2023. We did interviews all through Christmas break, interviewing kids during Christmas, and then we had our first cohort right when they got back from winter break in 2024.

So this was, quite literally, designed to be a safe haven for students at these campuses.

I mean, the first day we had hundreds of applications. It was wild, the caliber of talent that we got in that first round. We were all so impressed. We had kids [decide not to return to school at the end of it]. And every subsequent internship session — officially called Semester at Palantir — we’ve done, there have been a handful of kids who have said: I love getting my hands dirty. I love being treated like an adult. I don’t think college is the only option anymore.

“I love being treated like an adult” — such a sad low bar.

When you look at college campuses right now, they don’t treat kids like adults. They’re not equipping kids to be adults. In a warped way, they’re trying to be a safe haven — but a safe haven from challenging ideas.

Totally. So the Safe Haven program — was that something you drove? Was it your idea?

I like to say that any company that has its culture intact, that’s really functioning — the head of talent should be the CEO. To this day, I very much view Karp, among many things, as the head of talent. And we work really well together, which is part of why I’ve been able to stay here for 13 years. Thanks to him. Safe Haven was Karp’s brainchild.

Can you tell me a little bit more about that moment? It’s a very interesting decision, and then it’s sort of obvious that you tapped into something real. And I’m curious too, just about the outcome. What did you hear from students? How are they doing at Palantir? Are they still there? I am so fascinated by all of this.

I mean, in many ways we benefit from the fact that — and I’m not sure what the genesis of this was, but — the company has always had such a strong belief in the ability of kids to build our kind of software.

We just have so much history doing this. I’m one example, but so many of the people in leadership roles at the company now started here at ages 20, 21, 22, 23, and so on. They really grew up with the company. With many of our clients, you would see shock on their faces when they realized that their multimillion-dollar account was being handled by a person who looks 12. But for us, it was like: Oh yeah, of course, obviously. We don’t really have any reservations around that.

The vast majority of young people rise to the occasion when you treat them like adults. I feel like we millennials, and also Gen Z, tend to get a lot of shit for being entitled, having outsized expectations, being soft in terms of their expectations of the workforce. But the ones who come to us — and it’s a self-selecting crew — genuinely thrive on the expectations we’re putting on them. There’s almost this sense of gratitude that they’re able to, so early on in their careers, be part of solving real problems.

The same will be true for these high school students. They are going to be held to the same expectations as any of the full-time employees. We believe they can handle it because we’ve seen young people handle it over the years we’ve been doing this.

It’s just the logical extension of first betting on 22-year-olds, then 20-year-olds. And now it’s like: Hey, 18? Not that different from 20 in terms of what you can do.

I kind of want to know what you heard from Safe Haven and Semester at Palantir students about college as it stands today.

A couple of things really stood out as distinct from my own experiences in the early aughts. One, a very distinct shift toward psychological safety — toward really taking seriously the concept of safe spaces, trigger warnings, making sure students knew what they were getting into emotionally when they were going to be engaging with ideas.

And at the tail end of 2023, the thing that was surprising to a lot of the students was like: Wait, this sense of psychological safety does not go both ways. There are some ideas we were supposed to be protected from — ideas that are to be labeled and sequestered away — but not other ideas. And hey, isn’t that maybe hypocritical?

For example, in some cases, there were students who genuinely felt physically unsafe. Those were, not surprisingly, kids who were openly Jewish on campus. A lot of targeting of Hillel houses and programs, a lot of jeering and shouts toward kids, and targeting of kids in class. And then there was just the general open tolerance for pretty significant disruption on some campuses that kids had a lot of difficulty squaring with what they’d been hearing about “safety” the first several years they’d been on campus.

Wow.

What was also fascinating was that — and it goes back to the nature of the people who applied wanting a seat at the adults’ table — it wasn’t just Jewish kids. It was kids from all kinds of backgrounds. Many of them could call a spade a spade, even if they weren’t necessarily the group of the day. There were lots of other folks from a variety of religious, ethnic, et cetera, backgrounds who were troubled by what was going on and just wanted —

To GTFO?

Yeah, exactly.

How did that inform your personal perspective of what is going wrong with college campuses today?

Maybe I can’t separate the fact that for us, it’s been such a boon for talent attraction. The Ivy League institutions haven’t had competition for talented kids since, I don’t know, since the 70s? The 80s?

In our parents’ generation, there were acceptable paths outside of going to a certain number of schools. Whereas now, the Ivys, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, et cetera — they have really become the only acceptable option if you’re a high-performing kid and if you are trying to be — not necessarily upwardly mobile, but in many cases just trying to stay up. And I think there needs to be competition for that.

There have been a handful of efforts. The Thiel Fellowship is one example, but there haven’t been a lot of other serious alternatives for kids.

And I think the other thing — and this is maybe a silver lining of COVID — is that the kids are so much more open to doing things differently, perhaps because of this experience in their very formative years of: the adults don’t necessarily know what’s going on, and the institutions don’t necessarily have it figured out. So the kids are like: Hey, maybe I’m not going to spend another four, six, eight years of my life within those frameworks. Maybe I’ll take some risks, maybe I’ll be entrepreneurial.

How many of these kids went on to work at Palantir full-time?

I don’t know off the top of my head. A lot of it hinged on how many got offers, but the ones who got offers — we have extremely high retention rates, above 90 percent. [In an email, Marge said 75% of ‘Semester at Palantir’ interns receive a full-time offer, and more than 95% accept it.]

The first cohort was the winter–spring semester of 2023–2024, then we did one that fall, then one the next spring.

And we’re continuing on because the talent has been really strong. That’s part of what drove the high school campaign. We’re seeing these kids come out of the woodwork saying: Hey, I’m in high school, I know, but can I join this program? And we’re reading these kids’ emails and we’re like: Why not? Let’s see if they’ve got it. And we’ve been really impressed.

Tell me a little bit about the moment where you guys were like: You know what, let’s directly compete with Ivies for 18-year-olds. That is so ballsy. Tell me about that moment and those conversations.

A group of us were talking to people in our lives who have high school–aged kids. And we were hearing these stories — as many of us are right now — of kids who didn’t get into this school, that school — or any school that they were excited about.

We were also talking about how the past two years went down, in terms of what’s been going on on college campuses. There’s a huge dislocation between the experience the Ivy League is promoting versus providing.

I mean, look at administrative spend on campuses. On one hand: what are you getting for your tuition? And on the other hand, these kids are patently exceptional. So there’s some kind of talent economics that is deeply amiss — in terms of the value the Ivy League’s providing and the value these students are bringing to the table.

And when you work at a company like Palantir, that’s such a gold mine of talent — story after story of young people doing incredible things — Karp would put it as the “Palantir Degree.” It was like: Oh, well obviously we need to launch this for high school students.

You used the term ‘talent economics’ — that’s such an effective phrase. What is talent economics, exactly?

I just literally made that up this moment

You just made that up?

I do think a lot about — there are many elements of talent where there are buyer-and-seller dynamics. Buyer’s markets, seller’s markets, year after year. You look at 2022 versus 2025, for example, and you have distinctions there.

There’s also a concept — and I think this is kind of a Palantir-y way to think about it — of talent arbitrage. Offering opportunities to high school students is a version of this.

For example, we hire a huge proportion of our full-time employees from kids who are 22 years old. Early on, that used to be a source of talent arbitrage, because the places that competed for those really quantitative, talented kids were banks, hedge funds, and similar firms. But they would typically be looking for kids with a few more years of experience.

But in general, those firms have increased the number of new grads that they hire. So now, new grads aren’t necessarily a source of talent arbitrage in the way they were 10 years ago.

Yeah. That’s so fascinating. So I mean, part of why this is smart for you guys is you can get ahead of hedge funds and Google and stuff. I wonder if we’ll see other tech companies try to do this now.

Honestly, Karp and I have talked about this — we’re very surprised that other companies haven’t created something like Semester at Palantir. And providing kids the opportunity to get away from campus for a semester. I would love that.

Because, yes, of course we want Palantir to be successful. But we also want Western principles in whatever capacity to be successful. And so that means we want other institutions, whether they’re shaped like us or not, to be innovating on their talent approaches, too.

Did you guys — I’m sure this is not a clean cause and effect — but were you at all motivated by Zach Yadegari, that one kid who went viral for getting rejections from something like 15 out of the top 19 schools or whatever, but he had made a big business and all his scores were kind of perfect?

He’s an interesting one. I can speak for myself personally — I don’t want to speak for everybody else, because we didn’t talk about that specific case at Palantir.

But I mean, I think in his case — going back to supply and demand terms — obviously the supply on his side is very, very high quality. I see that from what he said. But what is he looking for from a demand standpoint? That would be my biggest question to him: Why do you even give a shit about college? You’ve already figured it out. You’ve already figured out how to be successful. What are you going to get out of college?

I’m going to slide into that kid’s DMs and tell him about this program.

I think that’s obviously a person with a tremendous amount of horsepower. And sometimes the hardest thing isn’t actually the amount of horsepower you have — it’s figuring out what you want to do with it.

I know we’re coming up on time. I want to ask two more questions. The first is: can you give me a sense of what college students are already doing at Palantir, and then, what do you anticipate high school kids will be doing?

Yes, totally. So when they join, everybody goes through what we call ‘indoc,’ which is (cheekily) short for indoctrination. Really it’s an introduction to our culture and how to get things done at Palantir, more than anything else.

We’re very, very big believers in the idea that people learn by doing — by doing real things, being exposed to real data, real problems, real responsibility. And so they do that for a week.

And a lot of it is not even a joke. It’s like: We have three goals for you coming out of this program. One is a real taste of our culture. Two is you leave with a working computer. And three is you leave with friends. And that’s what you have week one.

And then they, like everybody else, get assigned to a team of fully functioning full-timers. They get up to speed on their particular stack, their particular customer’s data.

And then — almost more importantly — they get up to speed on customers’ ‘oral traditions.’ There’s so much institutional knowledge that isn’t structured — knowledge that’s unique to how a customer operates or how they view themselves. Stuff that’s — in many cases — pretty subjective and requires having an intuition for what matters to a human being and what matters to an organization.

Many high school kids have that kind of intuition. Many college students have that kind of intuition. And that enables them to get up to speed on the customer base quickly.

And then, I mean, the kids are building alongside our customers. They’re building within our platform. Many of them become code-contributing — so they’re pushing the shape of the product that’s going ‘fleet-wide’ to all of our customers. They’re working very closely with our product development teams.

What are common teams that students go to? Maybe just rattle off a few of those.

A handful for sure. Utilities has been a big area that’s been exploding for us. Manufacturing, energy, hospitals — hospital operations is huge for us. Life sciences more broadly is huge for us. That’s just on the private sector side.

On the public sector side, a lot of them land in areas of government work that don’t require security clearances on day one. And there are a number of kids who have a deeply held interest in the defense sector who — in many cases, even in high school — have already pursued opportunities in that space. So they’re able to come in day one and work on some of the higher-sensitivity work.

That’s so cool. Okay. My last question is going to be super cute. We started off with your own story of working with Palantir execs to preserve the culture as it grew. How do you feel like these programs speak to that, or contribute to that kind of ethos?

One of the questions I get when I interview folks — especially because we’ve been around for over 20 years at this point — is: How has the culture changed? And in all earnestness, I think the culture is so much better now, because it’s this distilled version of itself — we’re so much more comfortable with ourselves than we were when I joined in 2012. Of course, it’s always easier to be comfortable with yourself when you’ve seen what you believe — and what you’ve been putting into operations — succeeding.

But in many ways, there are so many pieces of the early talent programs that are core to who we are. We have this deep-seated belief in the potential of young people, and of untested people, and in aptitude over skill. And in, really, the belief that if you’re willing to put in the work, if you want to succeed and want to partake in a meritocracy — great. Yes. We have that opportunity for you.

The other thing I think is so unique internally, especially relative to other tech companies, is we have an intense openness to internal discourse. And I think it’s great to be continually bringing in perspectives of early talent — high school students are a great example — and letting them have responsibility, autonomy, and an opportunity to thrive.

Not everyone does. But I think that’s the point, right? They’re betting on themselves, just as we’re betting on them. And I think that’s such a core cultural attribute — one that a program like the Meritocracy Fellowship walks the walk of, and strengthens.

That’s so well put. I also see a theme of contrarianism. That’s probably who you’re attracting through these programs — the contrarian student who can look at the status quo, and see it as such, and be brave enough to drop out.

If kids have the desire to go outside the prescribed, safe, conventional path, we want them to have that alternative. Not everyone needs to have that. I’m not saying everyone needs to be contrarian or unconventional or anything like that — but for the kids who are, they deserve a place, too. They deserve an alternative. And we’re more than happy to provide that.

— Blake Dodge