Earlier this month, Palantir launched a new internship for graduating high school students — a direct challenge to what it called “the shortcomings of university admissions.”

Dubbed the “Meritocracy Fellowship,” the four-month program is meant to compete with higher ed for top talent. Applicants need a 33+ ACT score, and selections will be made “based solely on merit and academic excellence,” according to the company. Some will ultimately get full-time offers.

“Absent meritocracy, campuses have become breeding grounds for extremism and chaos,” Palantir said in the job posting.

It’s true that elite colleges are harder than ever to get into, based on a confusing array of subjective criteria. We’re all familiar with the stories. Zach Yadegari, a high school student from Rosslyn, New York, went viral this month after being rejected from all of his top choices — despite starting a $30 million-a-year business and scoring a 34 on the ACT. Kids work their whole lives to get funneled into a handful of elite schools that are supposed to offer an experience that’s unequivocally worth it. But in Palantir’s view, universities aren’t holding up their end of the deal, Marge York, Palantir’s head of talent, told me in an interview (read the edited and condensed Q&A here).

The Meritocracy Fellowship, in some ways, has its roots in October 7, 2023. In the aftermath of Hamas attacks, the company set up an internship dubbed the “Safe Haven” program for students looking to escape antisemitism on college campuses. Palantir got hundreds of applications overnight. And among the cohort it hired, the new interns’ stories seemed to expose a deeper dysfunction in higher ed — not just the chaos of the moment, Marge said. The only viewpoints that were deemed a threat to “psychological safety” were those that challenged far-left orthodoxy, Marge said. Coursework felt abstract at best. Tuition and fees were skyrocketing — and for what? So Ivys could fund small bureaucratic armies while study halls and cafeterias got taken over by people with megaphones?

Meanwhile, the students Palantir hired? Really good employees. Through the internship and subsequent full-time offers, Palantir scooped up talented kids who might’ve gone onto work for hedge funds otherwise. And given the company’s long-standing habit of betting on young people anyway — a huge percentage of employees start right after college graduation — offering a similar path to high school grads just felt like a no-brainer, per Marge.

“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,” Marge said. “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.”

ALEX JUST WANTED TO EAT MAC & CHEESE IN PEACE

In October, 2023, many Palantir employees watched with some discomfort as their own alma maters transformed into hotbeds for protests, encampments, and, in some cases, antisemitism.

“There was just this intense sense of: ‘We have to do something,’” Marge told me. “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.”

That December, Palantir launched the Safe Haven initiative for college students who were willing to take off a semester to work at the company. CEO Alex Karp kicked off the internships with a post on X.

“Students on campuses are terrified and have been instructed by administrators to hide their Judaism,” the post said. “We are launching an initiative for students who because of antisemitism fear for their safety on campus and need to seek refuge outside traditional establishments of higher education.”

Palantir interviewed candidates all through winter break. Then 25 interns started during what would’ve been their spring semesters. Among them was Alex Spero.

Alex was in his sophomore year at Cornell when protests started to consume a fair bit of daily life on campus. People would barge into classrooms and libraries, yelling into megaphones “‘From the river to the sea’ and all that good stuff,” Alex told me. Most of it was peaceful.

But one day, the computer science major was eating mac and cheese in a kosher dining hall — his cherished “dairy Sundays” ritual, as he put it — when he got a barrage of texts asking if he was okay.

“And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m doing great — I’m having my mac and cheese,’” he said.

Alex and his friends looked online. Someone had just threatened to shoot up the Jewish dining hall.

“And it was just like, ‘What do we do? Do we just leave? Do we go hide downstairs?’ And I was like, ‘Nah, I want my mac and cheese,’” he said. “So I just kept eating away, whatever.”

The student who made the threat was arrested. But, as Alex put it, “the environment at that time was just not great to be in.” So after a classmate, seeing Palantir’s Bat-Signal, convinced him to look into Safe Haven, Alex applied immediately — and got the offer on January 2.

Soon, he started working for Palantir’s healthcare team. He learned to run meetings with clients and understand their problems in detail before coding solutions.

“I would go to the hospital and just sit there with the people who are using the stuff we were building and be like, ‘Hey, what makes your life easier? What do you want to see?’” he said.

It was a refreshing change from Cornell. Even the most relevant coursework seemed silly in retrospect. “Algorithms,” a famously rigorous class, taught Alex how to design algorithms, helpfully — but for esoteric purposes. Like assessing whether something was a Turing machine.

“Yes, [those algorithms] can be applied, but if you’re not applying them, you just keep learning and learning and learning these things for no reason, and the majority of it you don’t even need,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll prove anything’s a Turing machine ever again in my existence on this earth.”

Alex opted to continue his internship through the summer. In August 2024, he accepted a full-time role — and dropped out of Cornell. He loved the work. He’d found a social home; the people were smart and kind. And he’d already finished almost all the CS requirements, so the rest of his time at university, at $90,000 per year, would’ve been filled with electives.

So Alex took a step back from the societal expectations and, at 19 years old, made the decision for himself. Plus his mom approved — a bonus.

“I don’t think there was much school had left to offer me,” he said.

PALANTIR’S TALENT STRATEGY

Palantir has a long history of betting on young people. A huge percentage of full-timers start right after college graduation. Many of the folks in leadership roles, Marge included, started at ages 20, 21, 22, and so on. As Business Insider’s Rebecca Torrence recently reported, a couple of 20-somethings are at the helm of Palantir’s growing healthcare unit.

“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,” Marge said. “But for us, it was like: ‘Oh yeah, of course, obviously.’ We don’t really have any reservations around that.”

Bringing college students into the fold only accelerated Palantir’s bet on young talent. The initial Safe Haven cohort performed so well that Palantir has kept these internships going during every semester since.

The bar to join is high: fewer than two percent of applicants get offers. But the interns are often successful, Marge said: roughly 75 percent receive a full-time offer, and more than 95 percent accept it. And they do substantial work from the jump — across utilities, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and life sciences teams, plus sensitive work in the defense sector. Many contribute code to products used across the customer base.

Alex described his transition to full-time as somewhat anticlimactic. He left Friday August 2nd as an intern and came back Monday August 5th as a full-time employee — doing the same stuff.

“Nothing happened. Literally nothing changed,” he said. “I think that’s why it’s so funny because as an intern, you really are doing real work.”

It’s been a boon for Palantir — helping the company out-recruit hedge funds and similar firms. Between that and higher ed’s ever-more conspicuous dysfunction, Marge and company thought opening up the program to high schoolers was the next obvious step.

“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,’” she said.

The high school grads who join Palantir will be held to the same standards, on the same teams, as the company’s other interns and full-timers, Marge said, learning what makes the company function — and what to prioritize. They’ll learn, for example: clients’ “oral traditions.” What distinguishes a toy project versus something that’s relatively existential to an organization? That requires, as Palantir calls it, a “value orientation” for what matters to a group of human beings.

Many college students, as it turns out, have that kind of intuition. (Alex did, seemingly.) Palantir believes high schoolers have it, too.

“If kids have the desire to go outside the prescribed, safe, conventional path, we want them to have that alternative,” Marge said. “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.”

THE ALLURE OF BEING TREATED LIKE AN ADULT

Who’s to say if high schoolers are ready — emotionally, socially — to start corporate life? Maybe the option itself, and the potential competition for them, is good for the world. If anything, it’s an appropriately firm kick in the ass to Ivys resting on their 389-year-old laurels.

Among every cohort of interns that get full-time offers, there’s a handful like Alex who find being treated like an adult too appealing to turn down, Marge said. Instead of going back to the illusion of safety universities are offering, they drop out.

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

Meanwhile, the Ivy League’s “talent economics” are deeply amiss, Marge said. They don’t have enough spots, in other words, for world-class students — yet they haven’t faced meaningful competition in decades. Palantir is more than happy to introduce some.

“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,” Marge said. “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.”

Take Zach, the viral kid from last week. Where will he go?

I asked Marge if their high school program was even one percent motivated by his story. They haven’t reached out to him, Marge said. And the program isn’t for everyone.

But I mean, per my own personal judgement, Palantir seems interested.

“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,” she 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?’”

“For us, it comes down to — what does he want?” she added.

— Blake Dodge