No offense to you, but I'm a little tired of people belittling higher education. Colleges -- especially Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc. -- offer a wonderful education and opportunity to their students. The professors are the best in their field and you can learn a lot; and can grow both intellectually and as a human being.
What you take out of college is what you put into it. College isn't for everyone, so don't attend if you’re not willing to put in the time and effort, but you can learn so much if you do the work, pay attention, and get involved. This meme that education is a waste of time needs to be put to rest.
No offense taken--I think getting a liberal arts education is crucial. As an alum, however, I think I'm entitled to be critical about specific qualities I found to be problematic at Harvard.
If your goal is to be a good technology entrepreneur, it's probably worth noting that of all of today's technology leaders with entrepreneurial backgrounds, either zero or very few of them actually studied entrepreneurship or business in school (as a major).
If your goal is to be a well-rounded individual, then learning a bit about a plethora of different fields certainly doesn't hurt.
If your goal is to make a lot of money, then a traditional liberal arts education can be your ticket (historically speaking, anyway) to a well-paying, and hopefully otherwise rewarding, career.
If your goal is to learn as much as possible about everything, then you'll definitely feel at home in a liberal arts environment.
It's a very flexible tool for life, and in a very quickly-moving economic climate such as this, flexibility is key, as any recently laid-off Class of 2005-2008 investment banker will tell you.
It’s 4 AM, but I can chime in on that quickly before I go to sleep. I think that without much hesitation people would agree that a liberal arts education by definition is well rounded. You take English classes, science classes, math classes, foreign language classes, history classes, etc. Through your liberal arts education you learn a large breadth of material that when taken together helps to make you a very well rounded person intellectually. There's something to be said for specialization, but you can specialize on your own time.
I’d argue that being well rounded, social, and able to converse on many different subjects will serve you a million times over in your startup. There's far more to building a successful startup than a good idea, design, and code. That’s the easy part and it’ll certainly get you off the ground. But to truly run a successful startup, every aspect of your life and your personality will be tapped. Business by its very nature is a social thing between people and a liberal arts education, and the “college experience,” will serve you well in getting past that first stage and on your way to a legitimate business. If you want to be running things rather than working for someone, you need these qualities.
Disclaimer: I graduated from Yale in 2006 with a Psychology degree after being Computer Science for the first two years. Programming just wasn’t for me. Psychology wasn’t exactly my major of choice (although, lots of it is very thought provoking), but it allowed me the most freedom to choose the courses I wanted.
Most people don't go to a good college and most people don't take it seriously. More than half of college students drop out without attaining a degree.
The excess demand created by these non-serious people going to college has a lot to do with cost inflation.
Well, I can only speak for Stanford, but you can't throw a rock without hitting a startup CEO or CTO here. Every week there's a flyer in the CS building recruiting for a new startup. MIT may not have Sand Hill Road around the corner but I'd be surprised if they are any less entrepreneurial.
Actually, I don't think MIT cultivates as much of an entrepreneurial culture as you might expect, especially considering how solid the computer science department is, and how there's the Sloan school. It's kind of hard to describe, and I didn't go to Stanford so obviously I can't truly compare the two.
I loved MIT but I can say without a doubt (unless things have changed dramatically in the last 9 months) that you don't see flyers recruiting for startups, and startup CEOs/CTOs tend to be more than a stone's throw away. The caveat here is that a lot of (compsci) professors at MIT were indeed at one point involved in a startup of some sort, but it's not the kind of thing that everyone knows about (so they might be a stone's throw away, but in disguise, which is effectively the same thing). Almost nothing about being at MIT made me think "after school I want to be involved in a startup". Ironically, I now work for one.
Okay, well I'll admit it, I am surprised. There's a very big startup culture here - I've definitely heard more than one (qualified) person say that they aren't applying to companies like Amazon, Yahoo, and MSFT because they'd rather work at a startup. People throw the word impact around a lot. And during grad student orientation, they joked about the frequency with which PhD students leave the program to go start companies.
I supposed I just assumed MIT was the same because the CS departments are comparable.
This kind of goes back to pg's "Cities and Ambition." Even amongst top CS departments, I think the atmosphere of the surrounding area does influence what the students want to do with themselves. Entrepreneurial spirit isn't necessarily something that's ingrained into CS students by default; students need to be exposed to it, and more importantly they need to see how far they can go with it (which you would see constantly in CA) before they start taking it seriously.
HBS = Case Studies overload, the corporate type of cases....
1. It is really how for driven and greedy, (please don't neg me), people to channel their energy into money making, as that is the emphasis.
2. The brand power. It will unlock you doors just b/c of the name, especially in the corporate world. Think of it, nobody will get fired b/c they hired a Harvard grad, just as as nobody will get fired b/c they use java, or xml.
3. Connections. Lot of smart people, and some of them will be bound to be somewhat important one day, so they can help you out. the proverbial old-boys-club kinda of thing. This was true, especially during the wall street's financial bubble madness.
If you are looking into technology/mobile/internet companies, I am not sure I could recommend it. HBS doesn't quiet get tech. Since you are working with case studies, you by default are looking/studying the past, and not the future.
For traditional businesses, yes. Fedex was started there (as a class project), so my favorite dessert place (Finales).
Disclaimer: I haven't gone to HBS, but I know people that have, and have been to few of their classes as an observer, and took some classes at Harvard Extension. (part of fas, not hbs), but who were taught by HBS professors..
HBS has an Entrepreneurship Club which holds a yearly Entrepreneurship Conference, and it is definitely part of the curriculum, but in the past the real emphasis has been on assimilating MBA students into mainstream corporate culture, and not as much on starting new businesses. That may change now that the economy has shifted somewhat dramatically.
Anyone interested in HBS should read Philip Delves Broughton's book "Ahead of the Curve" about his experience there.
Much of the MBA class is Consulting & Investment Banking types, but there are plenty of entrepreneurs & future entrepreneurs at Harvard Business School.
I'm an HBS'er who has also started 3 companies over the past few years (including one while at HBS). I'd say HBS definitely emphasizes supporting entrepreneurship, but it's not the way that you'd expect. HBS is a great place to start a company not so much because you learn about entrepreneurship in the classes as much as the place is so well setup as a platform to support people starting companies.
Yes, HBS is all about the case method for its classes. It's actually a great way to learn. It is very time consuming, all-encompassing, and incredibly powerful if you commit yourself to it rather than blow it off the way many post-consulting, post-finance students may. The case studies will give you some tools that are really helpful in organizing a business, but they will not show you how to do it. The only way to learn how to start a company (in my opinion) is to actually do it yourself. The reason HBS is a great place to start a company is that you have access to all of Harvard, MIT, Babson, Boston University, several world-class hospitals, and many venture capitalists in the Boston area. HBS offers a protected time where you can get successful entrepreneurs (your professors, case protagonists who come in, classmates, etc) to help you come up with ideas, get in contact with people, and create something of enduring value. You are surrounded by classmates from any industry you could imagine who are connected at the very top who are excited to just have lunch and talk about whatever you want to talk about.
While it's true that many people out of HBS go to work at a company, the statistics show that more than 50% of HBS graduates ultimately do start their own companies, often only a couple years after leaving HBS. If you look at the sorts of companies they start there are many really great companies, not just random me-too sorts of small tech companies based on relatively thin IP.
I think it's really easy to dismiss a place like HBS as a place that just churns out consultants and crappy I-bankers. In all honesty I looked at HBS, and MBA programs in general, like that a few years ago too. I was a techy who thought most business people only had a limited amount to add to any true entrepreneurial endeavor. I still think that's the case for many business types and surely HBS still pumps out its fair share of consultants and crappy-douchebag I-bankers. Nevertheless, there are also some world-class entrepreneurs there. People who will and have changed the world in far more significant ways than most technical folks who think the way I used to will ever really appreciate.
Also, just for the record, I know there are a group of HBS'ers who do read HN regularly and have attended Startup School. I for one have not signed up for hndir.com yet and I'm guessing most of them haven't either. I have my yahoo mail account that I'll use to sign up for random sites, but I'm a bit more selective about how I use my .edu account and it's not clear from the website that they won't use this for spam. Overall I like the idea though. Just my 2 cents.
