Since every comment seems to want to point to Stanford's rich history, diverse degrees and entrepreneurial excitement (I'm not doubting that Stanford has all of these things) Let me try to make something clear: The author isn't taking issue with any of those things. The author is taking issue with 20 year olds who have spent 50-100k on their education being asked to drop out for a .1% stake in a company so they can make their professor million. It is a very obvious conflict of interest, great school or not.
1) we all got our undergraduate degrees. we dropped out of our graduate programs.
2) we were never encouraged by a faculty member to drop out. we were encouraged by the strength of the company and product. most all of us never talked with our university-affiliated investors about the company until after we dropped out, and after they invested (yes, basically all of them invested after we all dropped out. that's how we had a product to demo them with...)
Thanks for correcting this misconception. I expect that Stanford, like MIT (where I was), has policies in place explicitly prohibiting graduate students to work in any way for companies owned by their advisers or supervisors while working for them as students.
It was annoying while I was in grad school, but it makes a ton of sense for preventing the appearance that a faculty member might abuse their authority to get a student to work on something that provides them with financial incentives.
This is standard conflict-of-interest mitigation stuff, I'd be amazed if Stanford didn't have it in place as well. I think at MIT they can't even offer you a job until you're no longer enrolled to prevent sub-par graduate research getting through because an adviser wants a student to work for them. (i.e. "If you accept this job, I'll sign off on your thesis.")
If they're attending Stanford, they've not spent 50-100k on their education. The school's endowment is sufficiently large that significant financial aid is granted even to individuals from (relatively) wealthy families.
I have friends for whom UConn in-state tuition was more than attending Stanford, even when accounting for Cost of Living and frequent flights to and from California.
Just remember that financial aid includes loans. So while a university may boast that the average student receives enough financial aid to cover the full cost of their education, that could still mean they are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. (And I say this without any knowledge of Stanford's ratio of grants and scholarships to loans).
Why would I let my ignorance keep me from forming an inaccurate opinion, that would be un-American (hell, it was hard enough just to put that acknowledgement in there admitting my ignorance...I felt dirty).
I think you and nick are using different interpretations of the term "financial aid." If you replaced what nick said with "financial aid grants," it would hold equally true.
That's what has always annoyed me by the term financial aid. For the student or parent, they hear it and think "free money". Whereas once you start talking to the schools it ends up meaning a bit of free money and tons of loans. I'm years beyond university, but I do wish they would separate the two into financial aid and educational loans. It would give students and a parents a more accurate expectation of cost.
That aside, I find your example a bit disingenuous. It's easy to say it's the right choice when you're looking at one of the relatively small number of people who have done this successfully. But using that as the example underemphasis the fact that the vast majority who take that route don't enjoy massive successes, and most are -- according to Atlantic's sources - less financially successful than their graduating counterparts:
I didn't address your second point. I don't think Bill Gates's success is relevant. The question is whether students are choosing to drop out or being asked to quit. Not whether they will be successful.
I picked Bill Gates as a well known example of somebody who chose to drop out. I'm sure at least one unknown classmate of Gates also dropped out and didn't achieve much, but since I don't know their name, I didn't use them as an example.
Is Peter Thiel a Stanford professor stealing his own students away? How would Stanford, or any university, prevent Thiel from offering students money to drop out?
MIT explicitly forbids an academic adviser from offering employment (directly or by a company they own) to any student while they are still enrolled. Otherwise you could have a situation of "if you accept this job, I'll let you graduate".
It's not hard to imagine that not having a policy like that would open Stanford up to lawsuits, if for instance a student feels compelled to work for someone in order to graduate. It might still happen, but if it is discovered I'm sure there are ways to address it.
The author explicitly mentions conflict of interest:
There are conflicts of interest here; and questions of power dynamics. The leadership of a university has encouraged an endeavor in which students drop out in order to do something that will enrich the faculty.
ryguytilidie then made the connection to what some of the problems are with this conflict of interest. One of them relates to students dropping out but having paid for school.
The author mentions 20 year olds dropping out of Stanford. Are you really being obtuse over the amount of tuition these students may or may not have made? You literally believe that this was never implied?
Sensationalist hogwash. Stanford continues to be strong as a research university, and not just in engineering. Consider that two of this year's Nobel laureates were Stanford professors: one in medicine, one in chemistry. Think about the very strong history program, or the fine arts, or the (surprising) presence of the conservative Hoover Institution. In the years I spent as a student, I saw plenty of entrepreneurial excitement, but I also experienced excellence in areas far removed from the worlds of business, venture capital, and software.
Stanford is a diverse place. Just because a small number of students are dropping out to start companies doesn't mean that the end of the university is nigh.
I think the outrage is based on a perception of a teacher/student relationship, but unlike high school, the students in college are legal adults. Legally, and I would argue ethically, college students are not under the care of their professors or administrators.
If there were allegations that professors were tying their instruction to investment--e.g. let me invest in your company or I will give you an F--I would agree that there are ethical issues. But I don't see any allegations of that.
>If there were allegations that professors were tying their instruction to investment ...
That's not the point. The faculty-student relationship and university-student relationship is fraught with those kinds of ethical landmines. For example, I can tell you right now, if a professor is invested in student's company, he cannot be his professor ever again (i.e. he may be his lecturer, but he can never grade his or her projects, papers and exams).
This is all especially true in the context of investment and startups. I'm sure if you're a high-flying startup going towards a billion dollar exit everyone is happy and best-friends. But let me tell you, the nature of your relationship with your investors changes fundamentally when your business starts failing and there is a very real risk of people losing hundreds of thousands (or millions) of invested money.
>but unlike high school, the students in college are legal adults.
Doesn't matter. A doctor cannot write prescriptions for people he may know personally because of the obvious conflict of interest. Similarly a clinical therapist shouldn't be providing therapy for friends or family. It doesn't matter that all parties are responsible, upstanding adults.
Fair. I don't know what the legality is in every jurisdiction and it may very well be legal everywhere so I'll clarify. It is highly frowned upon, and potentially unethical, for doctors to treat their family or prescribe medication for themselves or their family. This most certainly extends to non-family members if a conflict of interest exists. It would be unethical if you prescribed medication to your bookie.
Anyway, my point stands regardless. The fact that there may be no strict illegality in a school or faculty investing in student project, does not mean there are no ethical issues that have to be resolved. Furthermore, the faculty or school may be opening itself up to liability. Frequently these kinds of issues are not judged (in civil court at least) strictly on their legality but rather on the 'smell test'. I can imagine a scenario in which a student may sue the school alleging some negative repercussions in his school life given that the investment fell through (maybe sue the school for tuition fees he paid prior to being 'pressured' to quit school). The case may be merit-less, but the school could be punished for putting themselves in a position in which a conflict of interest exists. When a business blows-up there are a lot of hurt feelings and a lot of anger and bitterness.
I generally agree with this - there should be some sort of safeguard or a set of enforceable ethics guidelines and oversight. Although: it's nice that instead of the students paying gobs of money in tuition to the school, the schools is paying gobs of money to the students....
Agreed. Stanford has a huge number of exceptionally highly regarded programs in a very wide range of disciplines (many of them are outside computer science or engineering).
No doubt computer science and startups are a big deal at Stanford, but that hardly means these other programs aren't there. No idea why this writer hasn't mentioned this.
Stanford will continue to be the way it is, just it is opening up more avenues for students. Coursera is a startup from Stanford, started by CS professors and students. There are people who want to make big money and there are people who love doing research and teaching instead of making big money.
School shouldn't be a library. I say startup like coursera just made university lab more interesting, solving more interesting problems, with a better salary. Not very different.
Well this is silly. Stanford graduation rates have been increasing over the past 10 years: (http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/2012 - search for point B11). 1998-2003 were all in the 90-93% range. This last year had a graduation rate of 95%. This doesn't support the opinion that students are dropping out 'en masse.' As for "professors having a financial stake in their student's work" – since when was this not the case? Professors have been dependent on grant money based on the work of their student researchers for decades; only previously, the students had no way of making money off of the work themselves.
I do think that it would be good to establish and maintain a set of ethics for professors who have a financial stake in companies, but it seems like this piece was more of a ranting projection built for page views than a thoughtful criticism on the state of the university.
3. Faculty must foster an atmosphere of academic freedom by
promoting the open and timely exchange of results of
scholarly activities, and ensuring that their advising of
students (defined for this policy to include postdoctoral
scholars and other trainees) and their supervision of staff
are independent of personal financial interests. Faculty
should inform students and colleagues about outside
obligations that might influence the free exchange of
scholarly information between them and the faculty member.
4. Faculty may not use University resources or personnel,
including facilities, staff, students or other trainees,
equipment, or confidential information, except in a purely
incidental way, as part of their outside consulting or
business activities or for any other purposes that are
unrelated to the education, research, scholarship, and public
service missions of the University.
You're missing the point of the question. The real question is, is stanford legitimately a non-profit institution?
That's not a 'silly' question, and it has material implications.
Before the Bayh–Dole Act, federal research funding contracts and grants obligated inventors (where ever they worked) to assign inventions they made using federal funding to the federal government.[3] Bayh-Dole permits a university, small business, or non-profit institution to elect to pursue ownership of an invention in preference to the government.[4]
Stanford, further, is a private institution.
See, for example, their investment company:
http://www.smc.stanford.edu/
which is part of the university and is overseen by the Board.
They certainly don't qualify (nor do public universities like UC) as non-profits; they don't reinvest all their earnings into their operating budget. Investors in Stanford receive a return on the growth of the endowment.
However, reality demonstrates that Universities are most definitely for profit. This is embedded in their operating principles. Have you worked with the Office of Technology Licensing?
This includes that you would call "nonprofit" according to IRS, but this is actually an issue that has been debated since Bayh Dole by people who understand the subtlety of what I'm talking about. In short, the very definition of nonprofit itself is inadequate the span the nature of corporations which are under 501c3.
> However, reality demonstrates that Universities are most definitely for profit.
They certainly don't return profit to investors, which is what 501c3 and several related-but-different "nonprofit" designations refer to.
I'm not sure in what other sense you could be meaning that they are "for profit".
> Have you worked with the Office of Technology Licensing?
Certainly, Universities have parts of their operations devoted to generating revenue; all nonprofits necessarily do, since if they don't generate revenue that meets expenses, they can't continue to operate. Revenue is not the same thing as profits.
> people who understand the subtlety of what I'm talking about
If you have a coherent idea, perhaps you can explain it rather than making implications that anyone who hasn't read your mind is intellectually defective.
> In short, the very definition of nonprofit itself is inadequate the span the nature of corporations which are under 501c3
Since the relevant definition of nonprofit comes from 501c3, it is, necessarily, sufficient to span the entities which fall under 501c3, since anything it doesn't span doesn't, ipso facto, fall under 501c3.
Universities collect funds. The excess of these funds, which are not required for the costs of maintaining the university, are distributed to professors and students (this is profit returned to investor; the professors invest time and opportunity cost while the students invest labor) in the form of internal grants. These professors and students then use the grants to develop technology, which they then use university funds to develop into companies (while also getting patent royalties from the OTL for having patented the tech and licensed it), which tend to then hire employees and donate funds back to the universities that fostered them.
This activity has caused many to question the tax-exempt status of universities. The purpose of tax exemption for universities is to promote education, not prevent universities in acting as for-profit institutions.
Some examples: the (complex and unique) example of Cooper Union.
The audits identified some significant compliance issues at the colleges and universities examined,” said Lois Lerner, Director, Exempt Organizations division. “Because these issues may well be present elsewhere across the tax-exempt sector, all exempt organizations need to be aware of the importance of accurately reporting unrelated business income and providing appropriate executive compensation.”
from article: "The school’s policy of sharing patent royalties with faculty could cost the university an additional $20 to 30 million in taxes a year."
Please, do not ever tell somebody they are intellectually defective; it weakens your argument. Further, as I've demonstrated everything to support my case, in showing that there are 501c3 unviersity organizations which have been cited by the IRS for having violating the terms of that.
> The excess of these funds, which are not required for the costs of maintaining the university, are distributed to professors and students (this is profit returned to investor; the professors invest time and opportunity cost while the students invest labor) in the form of internal grants.
Internal grants are not a redistribution of profits, they are an internal budget allocation. The funds don't become personal funds.
> This activity has caused many to question the tax-exempt status of universities.
People question lots of things on bases which are not legitimate.
> The purpose of tax exemption for universities is to promote education, not prevent universities in acting as for-profit institutions.
Its actually both, as is obvious from the tax code. Tax exemption under 501c3 requires both not being operated for profit and operating a specific form or function of entity (educational, in the case relevant to universities.)
> Note the discussion of unrelated business income.
Unrelated business income is a separate requirement of tax-exemption from not operating for profit; income from unrelated (to the tax-exempt purpose) business income is taxable to protect for-profit business from not-for-profit institutions. The fact that the IRS found some issues with some colleges and universities regarding proper reporting of unrelated business income does not mean those colleges and universities (much less universities in general) are operated for profit.
> There is an active lawsuit against Princeton on similar grounds
The existence of an active lawsuit isn't proof of anything except the existence of someone with a sufficient interest in the legal effects of the finding that the lawsuit seeks.
> Please, do not ever tell somebody they are intellectually defective
Yes, following on to 001sky, for-profit American universities do exist -- they're things like University of Phoenix or DeVry. All of the traditional residential big-name universities that you're probably thinking of, however, are not-for-profits.
Please see my reply on the other thread. I have demonstrated that the IRS found compliance issues in 503c universities which is clear demonstration of my point.
Non-profit just means the organization has to use its profits for the operation of the organization or give it to other non-profits not that it cannot make a profit.
"Shouldn't it be a place to drift, to think, to read, to meet new people, and to work at whatever inspires you?"
Should it be? Perhaps it's time we reevaluated what college is supposed to be about. Given the skyrocketing costs of a college education, not to mention the opportunity costs of the 4 years spent there, maybe we need to think of the "investment" in a college education as precisely that: something to be taken quite seriously.
I wouldn't want my child to debt-finance a startup, to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars, just so he could "drift, think, read" and so forth. So why is it ok that he does so for college?
College is the last great chance to "drift" in life before one has to grow up and get serious. Sure. But it's also the most pressure-free environment in which to build the foundation for the rest of one's life. It's a huge investment, literally and figuratively, to waste aimlessly. Use college wisely. Not every second has to be a grind, but on the other hand, I don't think over-grinding is the issue for most of our country's college students. Have some fun in college, yes. Expose yourself to new ideas and cool things. Great. But don't treat the experience as a four-year vacation from the real world.
I don't mean to come across as a heartless 'tiger parent' in this comment. But these romantic notions of college strike me as increasingly antiquated. They're luxurious fantasies that many of us can't afford to nurse.
If by "drift", we mean "get drunk and go to football games" then I am right there with you, not something I want my kid to focus on. But if by "drift" we mean explore the world and think about what it means to live in it, then I can't disagree with you more. That kind of drifting IS an investment. It may not make one wealthy, but it will likely go a long way toward making one happy, and it can improve society immeasurably.
The social implications of college seem to get lost in the debate on HN, and really everywhere to some extent. We don't send our kids to college simply for their own good, we do it also for the good of society, which is why, in the past, people saw fit for society to cover most of the cost.
> But these romantic notions of college strike me as increasingly antiquated. They're luxurious fantasies that many of us can't afford to nurse.
But why? As a nation we are "wealthier" than we have ever been, and productivity has skyrocketed in the last 100 years. Why is it, then, that we are actually losing ground and every day we hear that we can no longer "afford" things that we, presumably, could once afford? The retirement age is being pushed ever higher while, at the same time, students are under pressure to enter the work force sooner. This is not the economy we signed up for.
"every day we hear that we can no longer "afford" things that we, presumably, could once afford?"
Look at the hyper conformity of the average consumer.
I'd pay anything for health (insurance co exec and hospital exec smile)
I'd pay anything for my kids to get a good job, and rich peoples kids used to get great jobs, and also used to get an education, therefore education must be required for great jobs, so I'll pay anything for my kids vocational educational training (university execs rub hands together in glee at idea of multigenerational 10% annual tuition increases)
I'd pay anything to live in a nice safe location (sellers and commissioned real estate agents and commissioned mortgage brokers/bankers jump up and down with excitement at a new sucker)
There are a couple things in common. Suckers who see the expenditure as a universal, unarguable good, and entrenched players doing the ogliopoly thing by purchasing .gov regulations to prevent a free / competitive market.
Any time you hear some well trained little consumer drone claim they would pay anything for some trite object, we just hear an idiot, but a businessman hears a cash register bell... Pay anything you said? Well... that can certainly be arranged...
claim they would pay anything for some trite object
Education for your kids, health insurance to finance treatment for deadly illness, and personal safety are hardly "trite objects". If a person would not spend highly on these things, what would he be willing to spend on as a higher priority?
Exactly what I meant. Now imagine a horde of crooked businessmen (and bad money always chases out good...) purchasing .gov assistance in eliminating a free market in those areas as they start to pick your pocket. After all, you'd pay anything for those topic, so they'll logically take everything. Their purchase of .gov means there will not be any competition to keep prices down.
Finally another key to the puzzle is its perception that sells not the product. If you think your insurance company will stand by you to help you thru an illness, they would never try to screw you and your heirs as much as possible, well, I've got a bridge to sell you. "The system" is crooked enough that if someone is selling you safety you can pretty much assume they're just screwing you over; kind of like any argument in politics involving "its for the children".
Granted these are typically less expensive than the services you mention, but they're certainly not less important. Rather, they're sold in functioning, normal markets of private firms.
"We don't send our kids to college simply for their own good, we do it also for the good of society, which is why, in the past, people saw fit for society to cover most of the cost."
But it isn't as though they were educating the general public. Most people back then never applied to college. Since we decided that everyone without severe head trauma should have a diploma, that's no longer sustainable.
I think that this comment touches on something that a lot of people overlook when it comes to education: it's not just about getting a job, it's about LEARNING, expanding your world view and maye even getting to that 'well adjusted' point that so many distinguished professors are known to be at. This doesn't happen by chance: you need a strong community of learned people.
I'm immensely grateful for my time at University to explore not just a variety of topics, but to explore myself and my interests.
"Expose yourself to new ideas and cool things. Great." ... "They're luxurious fantasies that many of us can't afford to nurse."
That fantasy is still free and luxurious and new and cool, just you need an internet connection (which you need anyway) instead of attending school. If you're the type that doesn't want to learn, going to school isn't going to help much, and if you're the type that wants to learn, you don't need the school (to learn) if you have the internet.
The only remaining purpose of school for most, is social signalling and some advanced (and some not so advanced) vocational training, and a few nuts like myself who still think education itself is worthwhile, as opposed to mere vocational training.
In college I studied English and geology. I drifted by playing with computers, and having outdoor adventures.
Since college I have made my living entirely in the outdoor and computer industries. It's been a fun and productive career.
I think that's what the author meant by drifting--not getting drunk all the time, but exploring other interests.
If I didn't drift, I'd have a much harder life today: writing and geology are industries that have become less lucrative since college. My current career--building and operating websites--did not even exist when I matriculated!
Yes - a romantic notion that doesn't involve 200K in debt. :-) When schools cost this much money, they cease to become a cherished place for the free mind to roam for 4 years.
Stanford is a world class research institution. If it accelerates people creating companies by a few years, what's so bad about that?
Even if 100 people a year dropped out of school to create startups, Stanford would still have a much higher graduation rate than most US universities. Especially ones with nationally ranked football teams. This is a false problem.
The only downside I see in the article is perhaps the professors and administration are taking their eye off the ball on other topics while they act like VCs.
I don't even see how the article brings up a good point. A very small percentage of Stanford undergrads are dropping out and starting up, so what? Maybe it's part of their pursuit to work at whatever inspires them.
It's not just Stanford. This is really just one instance of the preprofessional training vs. intellectual enlightening debate on the role of universities that's been going on since the '50s (when universities started receiving massive funding from the DoD). Today, it's almost taken for granted that you attend university primarily to get a job, but that wasn't always the case.
People went to school to learn how to be engineers and other technical careers back to the 1800s. Sure, maybe you couldn't get a degree is "office administration", but to pretend the old university experience was all Virgil and Kant is a bit silly.
Now, the romantic ideal of these old-time universities is the image of the rich sons attending dad's school so he can get set in with the next generation of Good Old Boys. Boy, what a shame we've lost that.
As someone who graduated from Stanford pretty recently (2012), I can tell you that this is utterly ridiculous. Anecdotally, I would say there is a strong split between people who are insanely motivated to pursue a startup and people who think starting a company is a dumb trend motivated by naiveté.
Is Stanford a strong STEM school? Definitely. But if you take two seconds to actually look at the degrees that students end up earning (http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/2011.html#degrees), you get a picture of a much more well-balanced environment.
Communication/journalism (CIP 9) 2.5
Psychology (CIP 42) 4.1
Public administration and social services(CIP 44) 1.5
Social sciences (CIP 45) 20.6
Area and ethnic studies (CIP 5) 2.5
Politics & Bueracracy 31.2
Biological / Life Sciences (CIP 26) 7.1
Computer and information sciences (CIP 11) 5
Engineering (CIP 14) 15.1
Engineering technologies (CIP 15) 3.7
Mathematics and statistics(CIP 27) 3.3
Physical sciences (CIP 40) 4.7
STEM 38.9
Visual and performing arts (CIP 50) 2.6
History (CIP 54) 3.2
Liberal arts/general studies (CIP 24) 0.1
English (CIP 23) 3.6
Foreign languages and literatures (CIP 16) 3
Philosophy, religion, theology (CIP 38) 1.7
Arts 14.2
A dozen out of 17k and students and academic staff. Great story.
This interaction between industry and academia has long been one of Stanford's greatest strengths. There is no Silicon Valley without Stanford, and that didn't happen overnight or even lately.
Sure, CS is once again an absurdly popular major as it has been in the past. But with Stanford you don't have to choose between Harvard & MIT, you get both ['04 CS, color me biased].
"A dozen out of 17k and students and academic staff. Great story."
How is this relevant at all? The fact that some students are in a situation where they are pressured to drop out for the economic gain of their professors is clearly a problem. Just because it is happening to a small number of students doesn't make it okay...?
"Pressured to drop out for the economic gain of the professors?"
Give me a break. Taking a break from Stanford undergrad for a few years with a few awesome peers to run a startup happens a few times a year, if not more lately. Some non-trivial portion of the CS majors join to start a company. Timing often dictates market opportunity. This seems like an amazing one - faculty want to join, you're backed by the president Stanford university.
An absolutely fantastic opportunity that the students owe to their luck of having gotten into Stanford.
How do you know the students didn't choose to go to Stanford with the dream of founding a startup and dropping out? Hint: "I'm biding my time here until I meet the right co-founder" has been the attitude of at least a few students, going back years.
It doesn't make it OK, but it absolutely makes it an isolated incident rather than something you can use to draw conclusions about how the entire university is changing, which is what the article was about.
This is hugely myopic: reality is far more Stanford students are going to be joining Microsoft and other established companies (we're not even talking younger public companies like Facebook!) upon graduation than startups; those starting companies are going to be fewer.
Stanford is a non-profit institution, their mission is education, not generating a profit for their share holders. Venture investments as an approach to maintaining their endowment does not, in any way, conflict with this -- all universities maintain investment portfolios.
Hennessy isn't exactly a new comer to technology: when I was looking at errata for my Computer Architecture textbook (_the_ Computer Architecture textbook) I found it more surprising for me to find that one of its authors (Hennessy) was the president of Stanford (given that Patterson is at Berkeley and that STEM folks rarely took leadership positions at universities).
I did not attend Stanford myself, but plenty of my friends have, and I've been on campus many times. Like any institution, I am sure it has many valid criticisms -- the idea the educational system is purely meritocratic and available to anyone intelligent and motivated, for example, is still a myth (in several senses of the word -- it representations genuine aspiration, but does not reflect reality).
However, it isn't some kind of a incubator for a lilly-white privileged elite that it's made out to be: it's incredibly diverse and beyond being a top-tier research university, it also has a great humanities program including a core curriculum. Indeed, the endowment is why students who do not come from wealthy backgrounds have been able to afford it (the same is also true for many other elite universities).
A long time ago, a friend who was heavily into hip-hop culture and lived in New York asked me if "people were just being shot randomly" in California, as the rap music seems to suggest. The idea that everyone in Silicon Valley is a startup founder is equally as silly: I remember the weekend after I left Yahoo (by then perceived to be in decline) to join a startup in January of 2008 (the nexus of web 2.0 boom), more people asked "why are you leaving a known company to join some tiny one that may not be around" then asked "what took you so long?"
It's kind of like the piece he should have written in the first place. The first piece was little more than a troll comment in blog post form. This at least shows a little bit of thought.
There is enough data to indicate that the primary function of elite universities is to signal that those they admit are motivated enough and smart enough to achieve success, for their definition of success. What they do post-admission in the university has little relevance to what they do in their professional lives. These latest trends at Stanford are simply a logical extension of this truth. In this scenario, Stanford is simply a richer version of Y Combinator.
What this means is that in the rush to make more money and get more startups going, perhaps more meaningful things will be de-emphasized. The bright student on entering the school gets the unspoken message that founding a tech startup is more prized than say building the groundwork for bio research, or questioning and trying to change society, or perhaps investigating dark matter.
If other universities followed Stanford's lead, we could end up with a world where many individuals will individually be monetarily richer, but one in which we could all collectively end up less rich in knowledge and meaning.
So, because of a few dropout students who start ephemeral startups with limited scope and no scalability that are destined to die out in 3 or 4 years until the next big thing comes along, Stanford is now no longer a school but a breeding ground for fresh business intellect?
Give me a break. Stanford's graduation rates have been steadily rising to highs. Its research is still top-notch, and breakthroughs are found every day.
And Knuth... is that enough? Is it? Yes, it is. Sensationalism at its best...
Stanford are doing more than most to kill the traditional university (see Coursera and Udacity). It's only natural that Stanford-the-institution should be trying to change the model so it can survive. It isn't clear to me that giving students learning opportunities likes running a real company with real investors is a bad use of a university.
My undergrad university has had a program[1] where students start/run actual companies for at least the last decade. The school helps secure grants or contracts with industry partners and the students work on actual problems.
If you want credit you still have to pay like a class. However, for a number of them at least the managers had salaries that met or exceeded their course cost, and some everyone was paid.
Michigan Tech feeds to the biotech and automotive industries particularly in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin given the location, and a lot of the enterprises have done some cool things with those fields, as well as some defense work.
Nice point. The article is smart in pointing out the conflict-of-interest between professors encouraging star students to work on their commercial ventures.
But the article oversteps in saying this is the main thing that's going on at Stanford. It's a big place. My connection with Stanford is working with solar physicists there who developed a series of space instruments to observe the Sun -- a big effort, lots of people, hardware, and computers, but nothing commercial about it.
I am a current Stanford sophomore. I think that Mr. Thompson has a misguided view of what is currently happening at the school.
Stanford definitely puts a lot of emphasis on engineering and entrepreneurship but this has been the case since Frederick Terman encouraged Hewlett and Packard to create Hewlett-Packard. We've got plenty of pure researchers, especially in Artificial Intelligence and in self-driving cars. We also have Don Knuth. If you ever want to see pure academic research in CS, flip through TAOCP for a little.
We also have plenty humanities researchers and writers. The Hoover Institute at Stanford is a leading think tank about government and has a handful of researchers you've heard of (read: Condoleeza Rice). Add in our 22 Nobel Prize winners that are currently teaching at the school, and you've got a pretty established research university.
The real point of going to school is not to earn a paper with ink on it. The purpose is to empower young individuals to do something that immensely benefits them, people around them and society in general. If Stanford students are able to do that before actually completing the degree course it is even better.
While I agree this is a somewhat troubling trend, it is also ignoring the vast majority of students who go there and get an education as expected. It does seem that some conflict of interest rules should be put in place, but the hyperbole of the article weakens its case.
I rather enjoyed this post, but what a ridiculous premise. "There's a few great startups to come out of here over the last 100 years, the other thousands of students must feel the pressure to drop out!" I mean, what?
For how many students is this picture of Stanford recognizable? (I have never been nearer Stanford than the SF airport, so the question isn't entirely rhetorical.)
Is it not obvious to anyone else that Clinkle was secretly funded and supported by Stanford haters specifically to humiliate that university? There is no other explanation.
Clinkle's not worth taking seriously in any context, and its existence does not establish anything, much less "the end of Stanford".
Two of my better startup ideas are a Sokal Affair style hoax to get free PR, and the other is an elaborate mockumentary about startups.
The startup mockumentary idea could make someone a lot of money. If "virtual wallet attempt #21441" isn't pivoted into a mockumentary, they are missing a golden financial opportunity. I'm not sure what would be a better movie topic, perhaps kitty litter delivery over the internet? This does have certain implications for the movie idea because buying the rights to one of the numerous failed virtual wallet dotcoms might be the simplest way to get the intellectual property for the movie.
I'm not kidding about this. A hoax / mockumentary combo in startup-ville could be a serious moneymaker of a movie. I could see it pitched as a light summer comedy. Someone's going to do this sooner or later... best hurry up.
Can someone explain the appeal of Clinkle to me? I've tried to understand it, but even one of their marketers couldn't explain to me how it was better than carrying your wallet around.
