Quote from Samsara:
There is a reason why Silicon Valley is located near Stanford.
Thiel's program simply a libertarian version of Y-Combinator, but meant to illustrate an ideological position. In reality it's just... narcissistic masturbation for Thiel.
Those tiny few he funds are from a large pool of already-gifted students. Of course many of them will succeed -- they're entirely self-selected, far out on the tail of the curve. If they weren't funded by Thiel, they'd end up at Stanford, Cal Tech or MIT anyway. Because of this, their success will do nothing to prove how relevant or scalable such an approach to education could be.