A fellowship that does not include college

Ishaan Gulrajani, 19, was halfway through freshman year of college when his other life took hold - maybe while on a red-eye from San Francisco, returning from meetings about his new idea for analytics software. Gulrajani, from Downingtown, left the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and isn't sure that he'll return.

For Mount Airy's Ari Weinstein, also 19, the realization came three days into the college experience. His productivity software had just launched, and quickly topped the charts in the Mac App Store. He had to skip out of MIT's orientation, just to rewrite software to handle the unexpected load.

Conrad Kramer, 17, didn't even make it out of high school before veering from the college path. He'll graduate this month from Cherry Hill East, with a deferred acceptance to MIT.

For the next two years, each will be guided by something other than academic rhythms: They're among the latest winners of Thiel Fellowships: two-year, $100,000 awards aimed at helping them pursue their dreams - college be damned, or at least put on hold for a while.

The Thiel fellows, to be announced Thursday, are the fourth group of precocious teens to benefit from the largesse of Peter Thiel. An outspoken libertarian who made a fortune as a cofounder of PayPal, Thiel has set his sights on developing a new generation of risk-taking entrepreneurs.

"As student debt soars and the wages of college graduates sag, the need for more thoughtful and personalized approaches to finding success is greater than ever," Thiel said in a statement announcing his latest group of "20 Under 20" honorees.

Thiel's notion is that both the larger world and the fellows themselves will benefit if they don't take a costly detour through college, and it has stirred plenty of controversy. Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Harvard president, has called it a "special program to bribe people to drop out." Others have suggested the program has pivoted quietly away from a sink-or-swim dunking in the tech-start-up fray and toward providing more support and mentorship.

Thiel Foundation vice president Mike Gibson denies such a pivot, though he says the program now begins with a three-month, campus-like experience, and stresses the idea that the fellows are part of a supportive community.

"The idea of the fellowship is not to suggest that everyone should drop out," Gibson says. "It's to reject the idea that everyone who is talented, inventive, creative, and intelligent must go to college."

Gibson says a key lure of the fellowship is to help young people with big ideas to seize the day - or the "first-mover advantage" in a market they hope to crack. "Sometimes, the moment to act on an idea is now."

That thought clearly motivated the three Philadelphia-area fellows.

Gulrajani actually withdrew from MIT a year ago, using money and support from Y Combinator, a start-up accelerator, to launch his latest software, Watchsend, with a partner last June.

Their idea is to help other software developers do a better job, by enabling them to see how users interact with programs and replace the old hit-or-miss method - labs with video cameras - that he says even big companies use.

Gulrajani realized it was a waste to be a student at MIT because he wasn't really taking advantage of it. "Right now, this opportunity is too big," he said.

Weinstein and Kramer, partners in developing productivity software called DeskConnect, are the latest team to be chosen as Thiel fellows. DeskConnect calls itself "the missing link between your devices" - a seamless and easy way to file back and forth, say, from a Mac computer to an iPhone or iPad.

Their start-up company is already working on PC and Android versions of DeskConnect, as well as a separate app, Workflow, that Weinstein says "lets people do really powerful things on mobile devices."

Weinstein drew early fame five years ago when he showed others how to "jailbreak" iPhones. Now, he's a full-fledged Apple developer who sees lots of opportunity on the horizon - just not the rest of college, for now.

"It's really hard to reach your potential if you're in school full time," he says.

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