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Curious point: > replace universities > heading down wrong path last couple decades. not fun for students or professors. Is that (fun part) generally true? I'm

Curious point: > replace universities > heading down wrong path last couple decades. not fun for students or professors. Is that (fun part) generally true? I'm in my thirties, and I certainly had lots of fun at my previous job (MSFT, on developer tools), but none of it compared with either my undergraduate or Ph.D. student experiences. That also seems to be true for most of my colleagues and friends --- who have done the startup sold for lots of money, big smash-hit video games, part of the i* device releases from day 1, etc. All of the faculty I know really love it as well. Certainly, I hear bad things from the assistant (untenured) faculty, but all of the folks I meet who've made it over the hurdle seem to really love their work and have a lot of fun. Are non top-tier universities really that bad? Or is my circle of friends and programming languages researchers just a bunch of weirdos?

kmfrk 15y ago
I think there's something to be said for considering pg's approach for non-American universities outside the top rankings. I get the impression that the best American universities are perfectly fine, and then some.
shmageggy 15y ago
That point also struck me as odd considering he later pitches the idea of making a product to abstract away paralellism... a problem that would certainly be out of reach to all but the most educated (read: PhD from a good university).
bluekeybox 15y ago
> Are non top-tier universities really that bad? Yes.
- goldmab 15y ago
  Really? All of them? How do you know?
- kenrikm 15y ago
  I disagree, I have interviewed graduates of both for positions in my team and I have not found that the applicants that came from a prestigious university where inherently better than from a small obscure college. What you get out of your College experience like anything in life it's highly dependent on the personality of the person.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    A lot of that is in spite of the university and not because of it. But even a mediocre university will provide more resources than you might find without it.
- cgag 15y ago
  I went to a pretty low tier university, and watching videos from places like MIT/Stanford just blows my mind. It must be amazing to have gone to a university with good teaching and electives, along side peers who actually cared.
- cheatercheater 15y ago
  You can learn things well being at a shitty uni. I did this. You miss out on the whole experience of being surrounded with awesome people with awesome ideas, though. It's a very important aspect, which is difficult to make up for if you try to. It's possible with computer-related topics because of nntp, irc, ftp, web, and now places like hn. It doesn't fully replace it but it's a good prosthesis. It doesn't work for most other subjects. To put it simply, you can learn to cook italian never have been to Italy -- but you won't be a good cook.
michaelbuckbee 15y ago
Yes. You, your friends, myself and I'd guess pretty much anybody reading HN regularly are if not pejoratively 'weirdos' at the very least outside of the mainstream US college experience. The far side of things is the kind of college life portrayed in 'In the Basement of the Ivory Tower' [1], or 'College, Inc' [2] where it has gone far beyond just 'not having fun' and more into full fledged panic mode. Innovation wise, I think the kind of degrees and approach (flat fee all you can learn in a semester) of Western Governors University [3] is really interesting. It seems very much like a Khan's Academy style higher education offering. 1 - http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-basement-of-the-ivory-tower/6810/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-b... 2 - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/ 3 - http://www.wgu.edu/ http://www.wgu.edu/
dpeck 15y ago
I don't understand it either. I got by undergrad at a top 10 (or top 5 depending on the rankings) CS program, and while it whipped my ass I loved it. The freedom to think/learn/and dig into problems, late nights figuring out projects, scheduling in time for binge drinking that crazy semester I took 4 senior level CS courses and pulled a 3.5, I look back on all of it quite happily for its part in making me who I am. I do still have quite a few friends who have trouble divorcing themselves from how tough it was, some of the "unfairness", and having to do learn things they didn't (and and most cases I assume still don't) see the point in. Perhaps the same sentiments are more common/intense at universities and programs within them that are middling quality?
- chernevik 15y ago
  That's because you had (presumably) well-thought out rigor. Over in the humanities, the faculty gave up on / let themselves get chased off the Great Books about two decades ago, what they're left with isn't much fun. The social sciences mustn't come up with the Wrong Answers, or else. And the whole notion of merit and quality is sort of suspect in those disciplines, so the joys and terrors of seeking excellence are heavily obscured. So, yeah, those programs are a lot less exciting than they should be.
  - saryant 15y ago
    FWIW, I went to a liberal arts university and our Great Books course was the best I took. Fall of your freshman year, two professors, ~100 pages written over the semester. 11 works from the Iliad to Dante (more or less one per week). Yes, I got my butt kicked by it but every course after that was comparatively easier because of the rigor of that course and the mindset it left me with.
pnathan 15y ago
There are a number of problems in academia. I'll throw out a few, just as discussion points. * Pay disparity between professor and industry; if you optimize for money, you go more industry. * Papers are a key metric of success, not actual results (Which are hard to quantify) * Defunding of public universities * Rising cost of education vs. inflation or cost of living * Students loans leaving graduates (and non-graduates) in heinous amounts of debt. It's very hard to pay your way through school now with a part-time low-wage job. * Worsening average quality of incoming students causes higher burden on instructors and institutions * Increasing amount of specialization; liberal arts majors can be very smart and have broad understanding, but get shafted because paying for on-the-job training is expensive. * Training vs. education wars. * Entitlement issues: "I paid for this course, I should get an A". As usual, the cream is at the top, and can bring in enough money to keep things going, and can select on more than the ability to pay tuition.
- sidww2 15y ago
  > "* Increasing amount of specialization; liberal arts majors can be very smart and have broad understanding, but get shafted because paying for on-the-job training is expensive." Liberal arts majors can be smart and have broad understanding but so can technical people. In fact, the technical people I've met on average have been smarter than liberal arts people. While universities have quite a few problems, universities is where most of the world-changing research has been done over the past few centuries. If you kill the university before coming up with an adequate substitute for that function, you kill the future.
  - pnathan 15y ago
    > In fact, the technical people I've met on average have been smarter than liberal arts people. That's a standard technical person bias. I'm betting that its not true on average, that a good philosopher, businessperson, or history student is equally smart, but it's not as discernible due to the falsifiable nature of technical work.
    - sidww2 15y ago
romaniv 15y ago
Are non top-tier universities really that bad? Here is my experience in undegrad. 1. Most students simply don't care about their major's subject. 2. Most professors don't care about the subjects they teach enough to care about how students are doing. 3. Grading is aimed at punishing mistakes, rather than rewarding for learning things or doing things. 4. Guess what those things do to your group projects. 5. If you try to undertake ambitious projects or subjects for your papers, your grades go down, because of the things listed above. The most reliable way to get reliably high scores is to never experiment, never push yourself. 6. Degree requirements are pretty much arbitrary. For example, in my university, "IT" students (who weren't going to do any major programming on their jobs) were forced to take theoretical CS classes, while students in "Computer Engineering" (who were bound to do tons of programming) weren't. 7. Add to this the fact that you're expected to buy expensive useless textbooks that go from $200 to $2 once the next edition is out. (Of course, you can buy used books, but that's not the the point. The point is, they have no inherent value.) Etc, etc. Of course there were some exceptions, couple of great profs, several enthusiastic students, some courses taught from an O'Reilly book, but such anomalies were a precious rarity.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  2. Most professors don't care about the subjects they teach enough to care about how students are doing. I would disagree with this quite strongly. Most profs I've encountered love the subjects they work on - it's teaching they don't care much about. This is mainly because teaching and research are minimally related topics which a single person is forced to perform for legacy reasons.
  - cheatercheater 15y ago
    Ever think experience with different people is not comparable?
    - barry-cotter 15y ago
AmericanOP 15y ago
IMO, the two problems with universities are: 1) Technology has made college much easier than it was 20 years ago. What used to take a few days of research in the library reading books is now a google search away. Reading has been replaced by Wikipedia. Yet, the curriculum has not scaled up in difficulty. Students spend very little time actually studying and internalizing information. 2) College needs to have a more high-school approach to teaching students, delivering an active, 40-hour week of education as opposed to 1-2 hours of lecture per day. The problem with liberal arts degrees isn't that they are liberal arts, it's that the actual activity requires reading a little bit and writing a little bit. There's no intensive, long-term internalization of the discipline. To silicon valley, technology in education means Khan Academy. In the real world, it means a semester worth of papers written by Wikipedia in a few hours and midterms furtively answered by iPhone. For the amount of money students are spending to attend, Universities should be able to provide a more engaging, transformative product. While this may seem abhorrent to self-starters and outliers in this community, the reality is that the demographic shift of universities has been towards exploding numbers of people with average intelligence who sincerely need full-time instruction.
- jacobolus 15y ago
  > Technology has made college much easier than it was 20 years ago.[...] Yet, [sic] the curriculum has not scaled up in difficulty. If your statement is correct, you wouldn’t know it from reading the schlock that students pass off as papers even at “world class” colleges. Doing all the reading and writing clear, solid analyzes of difficult material is just as hard as it ever was. Harder, even, because there are a whole bunch of distractions that didn’t exist 30 years ago. > College needs to have a more high-school approach to teaching students Good god. High school is a stultifying swamp of concentrated terribleness. The whole point of college is that treating people like adults leads potentially to adult-quality thinking. Teaching college like high school completely undermines the purpose: raising a new generation of capable scholars and citizens. > There's no intensive, long-term internalization of the discipline [in liberal arts subjects]. Just because none of the liberal arts majors you took the trouble to really engage with actually took their studies seriously doesn’t mean that serious liberal arts students don’t exist. * * * Overall, I think you’ve confused the difficulty of making good grades in a college program with the difficulty of doing the assigned work. If you measure your growth by how many A’s you can pull, education is always going to be intellectually unsatisfying for you.
jriddycuz 15y ago
I hated college. I mean, it's a tiresome task to even attempt to enumerate all the ways in which I feel college failed to live up to the hype they feed you before you go in. And perhaps it's because I went to a big, run-of-the-mill state school, but I typically refer to college as an extortion racket now. I welcome any and all attempts to disrupt what I consider a corrupt and ineffective system.
imaginaryunit 15y ago
What I get from pg's comment is how the research experience has become less fun across the board in the last few decades (I'm focusing on post-graduate research, but a case could be made for undergrad research too). There are many reasons why this has happened, but the major outcomes are that: -Publication pressure makes it such that research progress has become significantly harder to gauge (e.g.: it's become uncommon for results to get reproduced) across many fields (statistics, machine learning, the health sciences, which I've done work in for over 7 years at a highly respected institution) -Balkanization of research fields where problems become increasingly exotic and narrowly focused to the point of being contrived (all the better for publishing papers of course) -Increased difficulties in securing research funding or employment (more temp jobs though); -Arbitrary metrics often being used to judge one's work. Example: if you do theoretical work, reviewers can reject your paper for lack of "applications"; if you do applied work, they can reject for "lack of theoretical depth" (what either of these terms mean in 90% of cases is arbitraily defined by a single reviewer who just wanted to torpedo your work). -In some fields, entire mafia groups have formed that rigidly control the review process for that field, which means good luck to you if your work competes with theirs and you're submitting a paper/applying for grants -Lack of accountability as to how research dollars are spent (vis-a-vis the public's interests) -... BTW, I say the above as someone who did a lot of enjoyable open-ended research as a grad student.
rohwer 15y ago
I'd say your circle of friends and programming languages researchers are the best part of universities. The fun part of exploring new ideas happens far more often at a university then at say, Accenture. But the paper chase is utter horror. Crap papers and crap results are trotted-out as productivity in some sort of bibliometrics hell-scape. Quantity rather than quality is part of the wrong path academia took. PG is right to focus on universities as ripe for a shake-up.
timr 15y ago
It's sad but kind of expected that the average response to your question is essentially undergrads complaining about coursework. That's the common answer, but not the informative one, because the people who get caught up in complaining about the trials and tribulations of undergraduate life aren't generally the talented ones who are going to create great businesses. Life is about the management of bullshit, and the bullshit level is the same everywhere. I think I'm in your camp. I left the research world after finishing a PhD, but before I did a post-doc. The first few years of grad school were great fun -- far more than any job I've ever had -- but eventually the music stops, and you need to find a chair. And that's when it starts to suck. The academic job market is dismal, and third-tier universities all over the country are staffed with graduates of top-tier PhD programs. You have to be a true exception to land a good professorship these days, and the ivory tower is littered with the corpses of the brilliant people who failed to reach the top. I had always been eager to become an entrepreneur, but back when I was right out of college, there was no such thing as YC, and definitely no such thing as a college kid getting venture capital to try out an idea. So I went to grad school. Years later, I'm looking down the barrel of a crappy academic job market, but the startup world had become much more vibrant. So it was compelling. That said, there's absolutely no way that your average startup is going to be as intellectually fulfilling as graduate studies in a field you love. Most startups are doing boring CRUD apps that take little technical ability or knowledge to produce, but a good grad program in computer science will let you work on the technology that startups will be hyping in 2032. There's no comparison.
- imaginaryunit 15y ago
  My 2c as someone who has a similar background to yours (did PhD, post-doc, now an entrepreneur): a startup is in most ways more fulfilling than an academic environment. I think startups force you to be good at many things whereas in an academic environment, you're rewarded more for being the expert in a single narrowly defined subject. I do have to say though, given the way fields are getting narrower and narrower and the way the academe has devolved, I see little real connection between stuff being shown in academic research papers and the technology that we'll be hyping in 2032.
  - 15y ago

kmfrk 15y ago

I think there's something to be said for considering pg's approach for non-American universities outside the top rankings. I get the impression that the best American universities are perfectly fine, and then some.

shmageggy 15y ago

That point also struck me as odd considering he later pitches the idea of making a product to abstract away paralellism... a problem that would certainly be out of reach to all but the most educated (read: PhD from a good university).

bluekeybox 15y ago

> Are non top-tier universities really that bad? Yes.

goldmab 15y ago
Really? All of them? How do you know?
kenrikm 15y ago
I disagree, I have interviewed graduates of both for positions in my team and I have not found that the applicants that came from a prestigious university where inherently better than from a small obscure college. What you get out of your College experience like anything in life it's highly dependent on the personality of the person.
- philwelch 15y ago
  A lot of that is in spite of the university and not because of it. But even a mediocre university will provide more resources than you might find without it.
cgag 15y ago
I went to a pretty low tier university, and watching videos from places like MIT/Stanford just blows my mind. It must be amazing to have gone to a university with good teaching and electives, along side peers who actually cared.
cheatercheater 15y ago
You can learn things well being at a shitty uni. I did this. You miss out on the whole experience of being surrounded with awesome people with awesome ideas, though. It's a very important aspect, which is difficult to make up for if you try to. It's possible with computer-related topics because of nntp, irc, ftp, web, and now places like hn. It doesn't fully replace it but it's a good prosthesis. It doesn't work for most other subjects. To put it simply, you can learn to cook italian never have been to Italy -- but you won't be a good cook.

michaelbuckbee 15y ago

Yes. You, your friends, myself and I'd guess pretty much anybody reading HN regularly are if not pejoratively 'weirdos' at the very least outside of the mainstream US college experience. The far side of things is the kind of college life portrayed in 'In the Basement of the Ivory Tower' [1], or 'College, Inc' [2] where it has gone far beyond just 'not having fun' and more into full fledged panic mode. Innovation wise, I think the kind of degrees and approach (flat fee all you can learn in a semester) of Western Governors University [3] is really interesting. It seems very much like a Khan's Academy style higher education offering. 1 - http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-basement-of-the-ivory-tower/6810/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-b... 2 - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/ 3 - http://www.wgu.edu/ http://www.wgu.edu/

dpeck 15y ago

I don't understand it either. I got by undergrad at a top 10 (or top 5 depending on the rankings) CS program, and while it whipped my ass I loved it. The freedom to think/learn/and dig into problems, late nights figuring out projects, scheduling in time for binge drinking that crazy semester I took 4 senior level CS courses and pulled a 3.5, I look back on all of it quite happily for its part in making me who I am. I do still have quite a few friends who have trouble divorcing themselves from how tough it was, some of the "unfairness", and having to do learn things they didn't (and and most cases I assume still don't) see the point in. Perhaps the same sentiments are more common/intense at universities and programs within them that are middling quality?

chernevik 15y ago
That's because you had (presumably) well-thought out rigor. Over in the humanities, the faculty gave up on / let themselves get chased off the Great Books about two decades ago, what they're left with isn't much fun. The social sciences mustn't come up with the Wrong Answers, or else. And the whole notion of merit and quality is sort of suspect in those disciplines, so the joys and terrors of seeking excellence are heavily obscured. So, yeah, those programs are a lot less exciting than they should be.
- saryant 15y ago
  FWIW, I went to a liberal arts university and our Great Books course was the best I took. Fall of your freshman year, two professors, ~100 pages written over the semester. 11 works from the Iliad to Dante (more or less one per week). Yes, I got my butt kicked by it but every course after that was comparatively easier because of the rigor of that course and the mindset it left me with.

pnathan 15y ago

There are a number of problems in academia. I'll throw out a few, just as discussion points. * Pay disparity between professor and industry; if you optimize for money, you go more industry. * Papers are a key metric of success, not actual results (Which are hard to quantify) * Defunding of public universities * Rising cost of education vs. inflation or cost of living * Students loans leaving graduates (and non-graduates) in heinous amounts of debt. It's very hard to pay your way through school now with a part-time low-wage job. * Worsening average quality of incoming students causes higher burden on instructors and institutions * Increasing amount of specialization; liberal arts majors can be very smart and have broad understanding, but get shafted because paying for on-the-job training is expensive. * Training vs. education wars. * Entitlement issues: "I paid for this course, I should get an A". As usual, the cream is at the top, and can bring in enough money to keep things going, and can select on more than the ability to pay tuition.

sidww2 15y ago
> "* Increasing amount of specialization; liberal arts majors can be very smart and have broad understanding, but get shafted because paying for on-the-job training is expensive." Liberal arts majors can be smart and have broad understanding but so can technical people. In fact, the technical people I've met on average have been smarter than liberal arts people. While universities have quite a few problems, universities is where most of the world-changing research has been done over the past few centuries. If you kill the university before coming up with an adequate substitute for that function, you kill the future.
- pnathan 15y ago
  > In fact, the technical people I've met on average have been smarter than liberal arts people. That's a standard technical person bias. I'm betting that its not true on average, that a good philosopher, businessperson, or history student is equally smart, but it's not as discernible due to the falsifiable nature of technical work.
  - sidww2 15y ago

romaniv 15y ago

Are non top-tier universities really that bad? Here is my experience in undegrad. 1. Most students simply don't care about their major's subject. 2. Most professors don't care about the subjects they teach enough to care about how students are doing. 3. Grading is aimed at punishing mistakes, rather than rewarding for learning things or doing things. 4. Guess what those things do to your group projects. 5. If you try to undertake ambitious projects or subjects for your papers, your grades go down, because of the things listed above. The most reliable way to get reliably high scores is to never experiment, never push yourself. 6. Degree requirements are pretty much arbitrary. For example, in my university, "IT" students (who weren't going to do any major programming on their jobs) were forced to take theoretical CS classes, while students in "Computer Engineering" (who were bound to do tons of programming) weren't. 7. Add to this the fact that you're expected to buy expensive useless textbooks that go from $200 to $2 once the next edition is out. (Of course, you can buy used books, but that's not the the point. The point is, they have no inherent value.) Etc, etc. Of course there were some exceptions, couple of great profs, several enthusiastic students, some courses taught from an O'Reilly book, but such anomalies were a precious rarity.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
yummyfajitas 15y ago
2. Most professors don't care about the subjects they teach enough to care about how students are doing. I would disagree with this quite strongly. Most profs I've encountered love the subjects they work on - it's teaching they don't care much about. This is mainly because teaching and research are minimally related topics which a single person is forced to perform for legacy reasons.
- cheatercheater 15y ago
  Ever think experience with different people is not comparable?
  - barry-cotter 15y ago

AmericanOP 15y ago

IMO, the two problems with universities are: 1) Technology has made college much easier than it was 20 years ago. What used to take a few days of research in the library reading books is now a google search away. Reading has been replaced by Wikipedia. Yet, the curriculum has not scaled up in difficulty. Students spend very little time actually studying and internalizing information. 2) College needs to have a more high-school approach to teaching students, delivering an active, 40-hour week of education as opposed to 1-2 hours of lecture per day. The problem with liberal arts degrees isn't that they are liberal arts, it's that the actual activity requires reading a little bit and writing a little bit. There's no intensive, long-term internalization of the discipline. To silicon valley, technology in education means Khan Academy. In the real world, it means a semester worth of papers written by Wikipedia in a few hours and midterms furtively answered by iPhone. For the amount of money students are spending to attend, Universities should be able to provide a more engaging, transformative product. While this may seem abhorrent to self-starters and outliers in this community, the reality is that the demographic shift of universities has been towards exploding numbers of people with average intelligence who sincerely need full-time instruction.

jacobolus 15y ago
> Technology has made college much easier than it was 20 years ago.[...] Yet, [sic] the curriculum has not scaled up in difficulty. If your statement is correct, you wouldn’t know it from reading the schlock that students pass off as papers even at “world class” colleges. Doing all the reading and writing clear, solid analyzes of difficult material is just as hard as it ever was. Harder, even, because there are a whole bunch of distractions that didn’t exist 30 years ago. > College needs to have a more high-school approach to teaching students Good god. High school is a stultifying swamp of concentrated terribleness. The whole point of college is that treating people like adults leads potentially to adult-quality thinking. Teaching college like high school completely undermines the purpose: raising a new generation of capable scholars and citizens. > There's no intensive, long-term internalization of the discipline [in liberal arts subjects]. Just because none of the liberal arts majors you took the trouble to really engage with actually took their studies seriously doesn’t mean that serious liberal arts students don’t exist. * * * Overall, I think you’ve confused the difficulty of making good grades in a college program with the difficulty of doing the assigned work. If you measure your growth by how many A’s you can pull, education is always going to be intellectually unsatisfying for you.

jriddycuz 15y ago

I hated college. I mean, it's a tiresome task to even attempt to enumerate all the ways in which I feel college failed to live up to the hype they feed you before you go in. And perhaps it's because I went to a big, run-of-the-mill state school, but I typically refer to college as an extortion racket now. I welcome any and all attempts to disrupt what I consider a corrupt and ineffective system.

imaginaryunit 15y ago

What I get from pg's comment is how the research experience has become less fun across the board in the last few decades (I'm focusing on post-graduate research, but a case could be made for undergrad research too). There are many reasons why this has happened, but the major outcomes are that: -Publication pressure makes it such that research progress has become significantly harder to gauge (e.g.: it's become uncommon for results to get reproduced) across many fields (statistics, machine learning, the health sciences, which I've done work in for over 7 years at a highly respected institution) -Balkanization of research fields where problems become increasingly exotic and narrowly focused to the point of being contrived (all the better for publishing papers of course) -Increased difficulties in securing research funding or employment (more temp jobs though); -Arbitrary metrics often being used to judge one's work. Example: if you do theoretical work, reviewers can reject your paper for lack of "applications"; if you do applied work, they can reject for "lack of theoretical depth" (what either of these terms mean in 90% of cases is arbitraily defined by a single reviewer who just wanted to torpedo your work). -In some fields, entire mafia groups have formed that rigidly control the review process for that field, which means good luck to you if your work competes with theirs and you're submitting a paper/applying for grants -Lack of accountability as to how research dollars are spent (vis-a-vis the public's interests) -... BTW, I say the above as someone who did a lot of enjoyable open-ended research as a grad student.

rohwer 15y ago

I'd say your circle of friends and programming languages researchers are the best part of universities. The fun part of exploring new ideas happens far more often at a university then at say, Accenture. But the paper chase is utter horror. Crap papers and crap results are trotted-out as productivity in some sort of bibliometrics hell-scape. Quantity rather than quality is part of the wrong path academia took. PG is right to focus on universities as ripe for a shake-up.

timr 15y ago

It's sad but kind of expected that the average response to your question is essentially undergrads complaining about coursework. That's the common answer, but not the informative one, because the people who get caught up in complaining about the trials and tribulations of undergraduate life aren't generally the talented ones who are going to create great businesses. Life is about the management of bullshit, and the bullshit level is the same everywhere. I think I'm in your camp. I left the research world after finishing a PhD, but before I did a post-doc. The first few years of grad school were great fun -- far more than any job I've ever had -- but eventually the music stops, and you need to find a chair. And that's when it starts to suck. The academic job market is dismal, and third-tier universities all over the country are staffed with graduates of top-tier PhD programs. You have to be a true exception to land a good professorship these days, and the ivory tower is littered with the corpses of the brilliant people who failed to reach the top. I had always been eager to become an entrepreneur, but back when I was right out of college, there was no such thing as YC, and definitely no such thing as a college kid getting venture capital to try out an idea. So I went to grad school. Years later, I'm looking down the barrel of a crappy academic job market, but the startup world had become much more vibrant. So it was compelling. That said, there's absolutely no way that your average startup is going to be as intellectually fulfilling as graduate studies in a field you love. Most startups are doing boring CRUD apps that take little technical ability or knowledge to produce, but a good grad program in computer science will let you work on the technology that startups will be hyping in 2032. There's no comparison.

imaginaryunit 15y ago
My 2c as someone who has a similar background to yours (did PhD, post-doc, now an entrepreneur): a startup is in most ways more fulfilling than an academic environment. I think startups force you to be good at many things whereas in an academic environment, you're rewarded more for being the expert in a single narrowly defined subject. I do have to say though, given the way fields are getting narrower and narrower and the way the academe has devolved, I see little real connection between stuff being shown in academic research papers and the technology that we'll be hyping in 2032.
- 15y ago