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How Universities Should Prepare Founders
311–320 of 333 posts
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
“the sense of superiority the experience seems to breed” Mostly an extremely online problem, not a real world one. More so the nature of the medium in fact. Evidenced by how you edited out the “dead” in front of VC funded when you were quoting me. You read the tone you want to read.
> Mostly an extremely online problem Do consider re-reading my comment after a while. > You read the tone you want to read. Please, don't gaslight.
“the sense of superiority the experience seems to breed"
I dont know how re-reading is going to help me see this sentence differently. I am just telling you my lived experience shows me this prior is simply not true. That's all.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no pretense. That's always been the whole point.
That's not my experience -- there's a whole pretense about being experts in a field, which is exactly what the poster above bought into. Having a PhD doesn't make or prove you're an expert about anything. It just proves you know how to do research in a thing, but that doesn't stop us from presenting PhDs in front of juries as if they're the only ones who know what they're talking about.
I don't see how these are incompatible. The PhD prepares you to be an independent researcher. The way you prove this is by studying the same topics for a few years, and by the time you reach your viva, you'd be expected to know a lot about the topic you chose.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
> then there aren't enough jobs in any market for the students on their courses. That has always been the case, because the purpose of universities is not feeding the market with workers or founders, it's feeding society with educated people. Which is incidentally an excellent basis for both founder and worker roles.
That is the aspirational purpose, not the functional purpose. Universities have long advertised job placement rates for the majors in their departments- I recall a lawsuit against a university I was going to by alumni with the allegation that the numbers were artificially padded to the point of false marketing (I don't recall the outcome, though). Even if we were to accept the premise that universities exist to feed…
That’s not aspirational, that’s their very original purpose, which lands in their name.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
> then there aren't enough jobs in any market for the students on their courses. That has always been the case, because the purpose of universities is not feeding the market with workers or founders, it's feeding society with educated people. Which is incidentally an excellent basis for both founder and worker roles.
A University education is priced as though as it has near-term ROI. The government has subsidized it on the basis that it's opening an investment with strong near-term ROI to its citizens. I don't think you can claim that this ROI is not its purpose.
If you only see life throuh a ROI lens…
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#316Pity universities couldn’t do a better job of preparing Paul Graham for being a human. Instead, universities like Harvard apparently do a fantastic job of preparing people to bloviate self-servingly, endlessly, and with a total lack of anything resembling introspection.
Basically, this is an “essay” (read: blog vomit) about how universities can do a better job of providing Paul Graham with the raw material he and people like him need to fund their lifestyle.
> We're like grad school.
Sure, Paul. That’s not a self-serving nonsensical statement at all.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not my experience -- there's a whole pretense about being experts in a field, which is exactly what the poster above bought into. Having a PhD doesn't make or prove you're an expert about anything. It just proves you know how to do research in a thing, but that doesn't stop us from presenting PhDs in front of juries as if they're the only ones who know what they're talking about.
I don't see how these are incompatible. The PhD prepares you to be an independent researcher. The way you prove this is by studying the same topics for a few years, and by the time you reach your viva, you'd be expected to know a lot about the topic you chose.
It's not incompatible, many people in order to do research have to gain a great expertise in a thing. Others can get a Ph.D. having really no expertise at all, but just the ability to get through a research program. Others still can be experts and unable to navigate a research program due to how capricious and political they are. So the pretense is that the Ph.D. is a marker of expertise. It's correlated with expertise, but the actual thing it signals is you've gotten through a research program.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is founding a company not a thing some humans experience?
You mentioned, emphasis mine: > benefit wide areas of the human experience So no, I don't think founding companies has much to do with the wide human experience. It's actually a pretty rare thing. And I argue that most startup founders are not concerned with the human experience and are just focused on what the exit looks like.
So a university should never teach a class unless at least 95% of its students would benefit from it? Yes, the one thing doesn't necessarily benefit everyone, but a university offers wide choices of interests.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He seems quite out of touch with the level of economic hardship involved in being a student; a huge number of students already work a couple of jobs and are navigating small businesses, especially here in the UK where he apparently now lives. They aren't going to have enough "free time" to play with a "project" even if a bit more is made available by loosening the curriculum. Empirically, student free time grew for…
I was going to say, "You might not have noticed, but it has been the 21st century for a quarter-century." However, you clearly did notice, so I'm not sure why you bothered to make this post. It's like you came to a conclusion, realized your empirical data was empirically out-of-date, but decided to press on anyhow. Rather than elucidate the subject, you just exposed your biases.
More recent surveys have not contradicted the trend. For instance, in 2015,
> On average, students spent about 14 HPW preparing for class, 6 HPW working for pay, 12 HPW relaxing and socializing, 7 HPW participating in co-curricular activities and community service, 2 HPW caring for dependents, and 3 HPW commuting to campus. These activities accounted for a total weekly average of 45 HPW.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-018-9497-z
I've looked for other data and have not found anything to indicate the trend has reversed.