11 ms·

The End of Stanford?

116 points by mjfern 13y ago

kmfrk 13y ago
The article's from April.
kylec 13y ago
Shouldn't it be a place to drift, to think, to read, to meet new people, and to work at whatever inspires you? This article does bring up a valid point, but it seems that the author is also blinded by his romantic notion of what a university should be.
- m0th87 13y ago
  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.
- jonnathanson 13y ago
  I would take things a step further. For instance: "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.
  - glesica 13y ago
    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.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - VLM 13y ago
      "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...
- mathattack 13y ago
  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.
- nether 13y ago
  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.
  - jff 13y ago
    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.
tghw 13y ago
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.
noelwelsh 13y ago
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.
- mattlutze 13y ago
  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. 1: http://www.mtu.edu/enterprise/ http://www.mtu.edu/enterprise/
- mturmon 13y ago
  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.
cafard 13y ago
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.)
- teuobk 13y ago
  Instantly recognizable. It's in the middle of the Oval looking towards the Main Quad.
teuobk 13y ago
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.
- slurry 13y ago
  It's legitimate to ask about the ethics of administrators investing personally in a student startup, especially when the students drop out en masse.
  - 3JPLW 13y ago
    Agreed. I'd love to see an article more thoroughly exploring that than one that unilaterally declares that it's no longer a university.
  - caycep 13y ago
    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....
  - snowwrestler 13y ago
    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.
RyanMcGreal 13y ago
There is also a follow-up post: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/the-end-of-stanford-part-ii.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/the-e...
- acjohnson55 13y ago
  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.
calinet6 13y ago
As a Berkeley grad, never was I happier to see a headline. Up with the Blue and Gold, down with the red!
tomasien 13y ago
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?
leoh 13y ago
Stanford can be a very empowering place, no matter what you study.
hemancuso 13y ago
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].
- ryguytilidie 13y ago
  "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...?
  - mwfunk 13y ago
    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.
  - hemancuso 13y ago
    "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.
  - tedunangst 13y ago
    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.
michaelochurch 13y ago
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".
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  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.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - jff 13y ago
    I know nothing about Clinkle, but I think it's a great word for the act of passing a kidney stone.
    - dkuntz2 13y ago
      That seems to be about as useful as they are so far as I can determine. And I've talked to a member of their team.
- VLM 13y ago
  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.
NN88 13y ago
Holy Hyperbole!
bbrunner 13y ago
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 http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/2011.html#degrees), you get a picture of a much more well-balanced environment.
- 001sky 13y ago
  If you crunch the numbers, for more than two seconds, this is what the (de-fragmented) data show: STEM = 46% Politics& Beuracracy = 37% Arts = 14% This seems intuitively correct, but YMMV.
  - 001sky 13y ago
    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 +Pro-rata on interdisciplinary (16%)
ryguytilidie 13y ago
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.
- nickbarnwell 13y ago
  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.
  - warmwaffles 13y ago
    They still have to pay back those loans. There is no way I would be able to get financial aid to go to stanford without paying loans.
  - modfodder 13y ago
    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).
    - tedunangst 13y ago
      (And I say this without any knowledge of Stanford's ratio of grants and scholarships to loans). oh, well, don't let that stop you from chiming in!
Glyptodon 13y ago
MIT is just the same - all their researchers and students are starting companies on the side while making use of MIT resources and networks.
mrmaddog 13y ago
Well this is silly. Stanford graduation rates have been increasing over the past 10 years: (http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/2012 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. Edit: And I should have researched a little more: Stanford does have a policy regarding faculty investments: http://doresearch.stanford.edu/policies/research-policy-handbook/conflicts-commitment-and-interest/faculty-policy-conflict http://doresearch.stanford.edu/policies/research-policy-hand.... Points 3 & 4 seem particularly applicably as a response: 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.
- 001sky 13y ago
  Is Stanford still a 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.
  - 13y ago
peterwwillis 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
kunai 13y ago
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...
Bitwse 13y ago
Im sure this is throwing a few people (myself included) on a lost search to try to find out what makes the payment app that they're working on so special that it's causing so many Stanford students to drop out. Nothing against the app, Im just incredibly curious about this now. All I keep seeing is that they have some type of proprietary technology that is fundamentally different than anything else that is out there. If anyone could point me in the right direction to see more about this, I would really appreciate it.
CrankyPants 13y ago
This kind of link-bait title and article seems above The New Yorker.
sloanesturz 13y ago
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.
not_that_noob 13y ago
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.
tn13 13y ago
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.
pbreit 13y ago
Kinda hand-wavy on what the actually problem is.
strlen 13y ago
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?"
jacal 13y ago
Ummm... April 8? Clinkle? Branson? That video? Will I be more shocked if this is real or if it's really successful?

116 points by mjfern 13y ago

kmfrk 13y ago

The article's from April.

kylec 13y ago

Shouldn't it be a place to drift, to think, to read, to meet new people, and to work at whatever inspires you? This article does bring up a valid point, but it seems that the author is also blinded by his romantic notion of what a university should be.

m0th87 13y ago
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.
jonnathanson 13y ago
I would take things a step further. For instance: "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.
- glesica 13y ago
  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.
  - deleted 13y ago
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  - VLM 13y ago
    "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...
mathattack 13y ago
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.
nether 13y ago
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.
- jff 13y ago
  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.

tghw 13y ago

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.

noelwelsh 13y ago

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.

mattlutze 13y ago
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. 1: http://www.mtu.edu/enterprise/ http://www.mtu.edu/enterprise/
mturmon 13y ago
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.

cafard 13y ago

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.)

teuobk 13y ago
Instantly recognizable. It's in the middle of the Oval looking towards the Main Quad.

teuobk 13y ago

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.

slurry 13y ago
It's legitimate to ask about the ethics of administrators investing personally in a student startup, especially when the students drop out en masse.
- 3JPLW 13y ago
  Agreed. I'd love to see an article more thoroughly exploring that than one that unilaterally declares that it's no longer a university.
- caycep 13y ago
  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....
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  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.

RyanMcGreal 13y ago

There is also a follow-up post: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/the-end-of-stanford-part-ii.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/the-e...

acjohnson55 13y ago
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.

calinet6 13y ago

As a Berkeley grad, never was I happier to see a headline. Up with the Blue and Gold, down with the red!

tomasien 13y ago

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?

leoh 13y ago

Stanford can be a very empowering place, no matter what you study.

hemancuso 13y ago

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].

ryguytilidie 13y ago
"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...?
- mwfunk 13y ago
  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.
- hemancuso 13y ago
  "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.
- tedunangst 13y ago
  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.

michaelochurch 13y ago

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".

dkuntz2 13y ago
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.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jff 13y ago
  I know nothing about Clinkle, but I think it's a great word for the act of passing a kidney stone.
  - dkuntz2 13y ago
    That seems to be about as useful as they are so far as I can determine. And I've talked to a member of their team.
VLM 13y ago
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.

NN88 13y ago

Holy Hyperbole!

bbrunner 13y ago

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 http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/2011.html#degrees), you get a picture of a much more well-balanced environment.

001sky 13y ago
If you crunch the numbers, for more than two seconds, this is what the (de-fragmented) data show: STEM = 46% Politics& Beuracracy = 37% Arts = 14% This seems intuitively correct, but YMMV.
- 001sky 13y ago
  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 +Pro-rata on interdisciplinary (16%)

ryguytilidie 13y ago

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.

nickbarnwell 13y ago
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.
- warmwaffles 13y ago
  They still have to pay back those loans. There is no way I would be able to get financial aid to go to stanford without paying loans.
- modfodder 13y ago
  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).
  - tedunangst 13y ago
    (And I say this without any knowledge of Stanford's ratio of grants and scholarships to loans). oh, well, don't let that stop you from chiming in!

Glyptodon 13y ago

MIT is just the same - all their researchers and students are starting companies on the side while making use of MIT resources and networks.

mrmaddog 13y ago

Well this is silly. Stanford graduation rates have been increasing over the past 10 years: (http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/2012 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. Edit: And I should have researched a little more: Stanford does have a policy regarding faculty investments: http://doresearch.stanford.edu/policies/research-policy-handbook/conflicts-commitment-and-interest/faculty-policy-conflict http://doresearch.stanford.edu/policies/research-policy-hand.... Points 3 & 4 seem particularly applicably as a response: 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.

001sky 13y ago
Is Stanford still a 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.
- 13y ago

peterwwillis 13y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

kunai 13y ago

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...

Bitwse 13y ago

Im sure this is throwing a few people (myself included) on a lost search to try to find out what makes the payment app that they're working on so special that it's causing so many Stanford students to drop out. Nothing against the app, Im just incredibly curious about this now. All I keep seeing is that they have some type of proprietary technology that is fundamentally different than anything else that is out there. If anyone could point me in the right direction to see more about this, I would really appreciate it.

CrankyPants 13y ago

This kind of link-bait title and article seems above The New Yorker.

sloanesturz 13y ago

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.

not_that_noob 13y ago

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.

tn13 13y ago

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.

pbreit 13y ago

Kinda hand-wavy on what the actually problem is.

strlen 13y ago

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?"

jacal 13y ago

Ummm... April 8? Clinkle? Branson? That video? Will I be more shocked if this is real or if it's really successful?