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YC now functionally resembles a world-class university: huge endowment; elite alumni; pure & applied research departments; staff scientists; education program;

• bzbarsky 10y ago
  > huge endowment Really? Some endowment sizes for world-class universities: MIT: $13 billion Caltech: $2 billion Harvard: $36 billion Stanford: $22 billion Princeton: $21 billion Yale: $25 billion Cambridge: GBP ~6 billion Oxford: GBP ~4 billion Caltech is the outlier here for US universities, but it's also an outlier in size; its endowment per student is still about $1 million, which is in the same ballpark as the other US universities on the list. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit... for probably more data than you ever wanted. ;) I'm having a hard time finding how much money YC has lying around, but I would be rather surprised if it's in the billions USD. > pure & applied research departments; staff scientists On a _tiny_ scale compared to a world-class university.