‘Skip the indoctrination’: Palantir invades elite colleges with militant recruiting campaign

This week, as Carnegie Mellon University students filtered out of classrooms into the fresh spring sun, they ran smack into a dire warning. Around the Pittsburgh campus were black signs with bold white text: “A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West. Our culture has fallen into shallow consumerism while abandoning national purpose.” 

It was a sermon from Palantir CEO Alex Karp, an eccentric, fiercely nationalist defense tech stalwart who wanted students to know that, unlike most of Silicon Valley, his company has always had a patriotic mission. The signs ended with a tantalizing invitation: “We build to dominate. Join us.”

It was intentionally provocative, according to Palantir’s head of talent, Margaret York — a way for the company, which builds software systems for hospitals, as well as the Defense Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to show students its cards from the start. “This is Dr. Karp speaking to students like adults,” she said. “And saying, ‘Hey, if you want to be treated like you have a mind and like you can engage with challenging ideas and like you have something to give as an 18- through 22-year-old, we are willing to engage in that conversation with you.’”  

As defense tech companies enjoy a financial and cultural resurgence — they’ve raised $155 billion globally since 2021, according to PitchBook — Palantir is rolling out a new kind of campus recruiting, one that trades free pizza and swag for ideological fervor. With billboard campaigns, fellowship programs, and mission-driven messaging, Palantir and peers like Anduril and Hadrian are reframing national security work as urgent, lucrative, and badass. It’s a dramatic shift from five years ago, when the same companies were protested off campuses for their ties to ICE and the military. Now, defense tech is not just tolerated at top schools — it’s trending. 

Drew Peterson, a senior at Georgetown, said five of his friends applied to Palantir and one turned down a lucrative offer in investment banking to go to a defense tech startup. Andrew Reddie, an associate professor at UC Berkeley who teaches classes in national security, said that while OpenAI and Anthropic remain at the top of student wishlists, jobs at defense tech companies are increasingly coveted. And students at Stanford are clamoring to build for the government. “My most effective and moral friends are now working for Palantir,” senior Divya Ganesan told The Standard last month. 

The Palantir ads — which have also turned up at the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, and Georgia Tech — are only part of the collegiate charm offensive. This week, the company launched its four-month Meritocracy Fellowship, a program in the vein of the Thiel Fellowship (Peter Thiel is a founder of Palantir), aimed at high school students who are open to skipping college in favor of full-time employment. “Skip the indoctrination,” a posting for the fellowship says. “Get the Palantir Degree.”  

Palantir’s ideological bedfellows have taken a similar tack. Defense unicorn Anduril in the last several weeks plastered a cheeky message all over Boston, Seattle, and Atlanta: “Don’t work at Anduril.” In an accompanying video, one employee complains about how “obsessed with America” his coworkers are. Meanwhile, when a student panel at Stanford’s business school denied an application for a defense tech club in 2024, venture firm Andreessen Horowitz and Anduril threw an “unofficial” launch party attended by students and founders (mainly young men with mullets and lips full of Zynn nicotine pouches) who’d road-tripped up from the defense-tech hotbed of El Segundo — aka the “Gundo.”  

Much of Palantir’s recent college recruiting strategy has revolved around, well, rebuking college. As protests broke out across campuses in 2023 in response to university ties to Israel, Karp watched in disapproval. “I’m telling young people: You are breathing the vapors of a dangerous new fake and self-destructive religion when you are sitting at your elite school pretending, because you watched TikTok twice and got an A+ on some crazy paper, that you actually understand the world,” he said at a December 2023 national defense forum. “And you’re not welcome at my company.”

But other students, he made clear, were very welcome. Karp launched a program for students who, “because of antisemitism,” had begun to “fear for their safety on campus.” It was the start of Palantir’s semester fellowship, which accepts about 2% of applicants and has attracted students from all backgrounds, according to York. 

York said the Semester at Palantir program opened the floodgates, with an increasing number of young people asking, “Is there a place for me?”

“Palantir being Palantir, we thought, hey, let’s meet these kids,” York said. The company realized that, for some students, college wasn’t working. “It’s not treating them like adults, and in many cases, it’s just totally not meeting the needs of these incredibly talented kids that want to be put to work on something real.”

Thus was born the Meritocracy Fellowship: High school students with SAT scores of at least 1460 could spend the fall semester not in school, but at Palantir, with a shot at a full-time role.

Recruiting for Palantir has become easier than ever before. I asked York what it was like in the Before Times, when defense tech was taboo and students showed up in droves to protest Palantir’s work at the border. York said the company has never been fazed by controversy. “We love that people will stand up for what they believe in and voice what they think, even if it’s not necessarily what the majority of us think or an opinion that we necessarily agree with,” she said. 

On Wednesday, reports came out that Palantir is working with ICE to help the Trump administration with deportations. York said applications for the Meritocracy fellowship have remained steady.