The whole charade strikes me as a politician's lie, where he talks around a subject at length, leading people to a conclusion without directly stating it. It's like watching Rumsfeld talk about Iraq and 9/11, never quite blaming them, but using the words closely together so people will get the desired idea.
Sure, technically nobody in the Bush administration said that Iraq did 9/11, but there's a reason that a huge swath of America thought they said it, and it wasn't accidental. The same applies here.
Just because the guy rails against college, has wrote a book about the evils of "multiculturalism" at Stanford, and gives smart kids money to drop out and be publicized doesn't mean he's against college... he's just sending every possible signal that he is, whilst not quite making the statement.
It's a form of propaganda, and it works, because the signal still transmits fairly well, but whenever he's called out on it, somebody (you, in this case) will note that he never exactly stated the message that he's been working hard to convey, so it's a lie. It's a great system, tried and true by politicians for (at a minimum) a century.
Peter Thiel is not a good guy. Peter Thiel doesn't want to make the world better. Peter Thiel is in this world for Peter Thiel, and that's fucking it.
So if he's claiming to be helping somebody else, you already know it's a lie.