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Ask YC: What percentage of the YC accepted come from Ivy League Schools?
YC is a subjective judging process. Is the school that ones goes to weighed in proportionally or over-proportionally?
This question could be rephrased as : Of the people picked so far, what is the ratio of people from 'good schools' vs people from 'bad schools'? Is this information publicly available?
- amrithk 18y agoI am not sure if the judges look at the schools the candidates come from. Maybe I am mistaken?
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- SwellJoe 18y agoThey look at everything, I'm sure, or they wouldn't ask. But, I doubt it is considered a vital statistic...just another way to indicate motivation and ambition. I'm pretty sure pg and Co. know that university is not where most of the best hackers acquired their skills.
- SwellJoe 18y agoOne would have to have data about the relative sizes of student bodies of all schools everywhere vs. the Ivy League schools, which I don't have. But, it's easy to say that a lot of the YC company founders that I know came from the following schools: Stanford (by far the leader, I'm sure) MIT Oxford (a surprise to me) CMU But, a lot also came from other places. I can think of examples from UPenn, University of Florida, many of the UC schools, Monash University (in Australia), as well as folks who don't actually have a university degree (me, for example--I went to a bunch of different schools for a bunch of different subjects, and none worth speaking of). I suspect the "disproportionate" numbers are due to the basic fact that folks who go to an "elite" university are more likely to be highly ambitious, and school was just another way to achieve. Motivation plays a big role in getting into YC...and getting into and graduating from a top university takes a lot of ambition and motivation. I don't think YC thinks a lot about the college field on the application. If they did, Virtualmin wouldn't be a YC funded company; though my co-founder did go to a good school, I didn't know what it was when I filled out the application, so as far as YC could tell we were both marginally educated.
- pg 18y agohttp://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html Off the top of my head I know of 5 founders in the current group of 50-60 who went to Ivy League colleges. There may be more, but I'd have to go back and look at the applications to know how many.
- qhoxie 18y agoGiven past commentary from PG/YC, the supposed caliber of the school an applicant attended would have little impact on their decision. I could see them analyzing more factors relating to the school, such as difficulty of the major, honors status, and time taken to graduate. These seem like they would have equal or greater impact on decisions than the school's reputation itself.