Palantir Technologies is doubling down on a novel talent pipeline: high schoolers.
On Monday, the defense tech software giant launched applications for the second cohort of its New York City-based Meritocracy Fellowship, a months-long internship program for 18-year-olds who have recently graduated from high school.
Over 500 people applied to the first cohort, and 22 are currently in the program, according to head of talent Marge York. “More than a handful” will wrap up the program in December with an offer to immediately join Palantir as full-time employees, she added.
The second cohort will receive a stipend of $5,400 a month and will run from August to December 2026.
The premise of the Meritocracy Fellowship — to skip college altogether and start work in tech — echoes the swelling skepticism of the value of an undergraduate degree and the influx of young people building startups in Silicon Valley.
Palantir chief executive Alex Karp received a bachelor’s degree from Haverford College, a liberal arts school, and a Ph.D. in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University Frankfurt.
“The college industrial complex wants you on their timeline: four years of prerequisites, debt, and indoctrination,” a blog post about the fellowship reads. “While they debate DEI vs. SATs, we’re focused on one thing: building.”
Interviews screen for “true diversity of thought”
When interviewing prospective fellows, York is looking for “true diversity of thought,” adding “it’s not enough to just be smart.” To her, these three qualities make for a successful applicant: technical process, high agency, and maturity.
“The ones that really differentiated themselves from the pack,” York said, “are doers. They’re builders, and they’re just deeply inclined to get hands on.”
Those interviewing for the program should expect technical skill assessments and questions about why other options, like a traditional college experience, might “not serve them at this point,” York said.
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Most fellows admitted to the first cohort had strong coding skills, which York said were, in some cases, better than Palantir’s post-undergraduate hires.
Palantir-approved coursework
To fellows, the first few weeks of the program might feel like an introductory humanities course. There are required readings, debates led by Palantir employees who moonlight as something akin to a teaching assistant, and guest lectures.
Current fellows received presentations from technologists and academics, including Bob McGrew, chief research officer at OpenAI, and Edward Wittenstein, who teaches courses about artificial intelligence and national security at Yale University.
Talking about religion and taking field trips to Gettysburg may not teach fellows much about software engineering, but York said the Palantir-sanctioned coursework does foster “that ability to think critically and to engage with ideas that, at first blush, appear in conflict.”
Meritocracy Fellows are then placed on customer-facing and software engineering teams, where they do the typical work of full-time, salaried employees.
While hundreds of high school seniors applied to the first cohort of the Meritocracy Fellowship, some current fellows faced criticism for joining the company instead of attending college: “Every single person, and this has been an experience for a lot of us, told me not to do this,” one told Karp in a video posted on the company’s blog. “It was, like, basically unanimous.”
The company welcomes the skeptics. “The amount of pressure we’re putting on universities — you might underestimate,” Karp told three fellows in a video. “If we do this program for a couple years — let’s just say we scale to, like, 80, 90 people — that’s a real problem for the universities.”
“Every single system is parasitic,” Karp added. “Our job is to break that.”
