How Universities Should Prepare Founders • Hacker News Board

Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders

#331

Post by figassis » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 10:50 AM UTC

zdragnar wrote: post #292

Juliate wrote: post #194

Earlier 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…

"Universities have long advertised job placement rates for the majors in their departments" - they shouldn't have, this was actually never their purpose but it was easy to make that promise when jobs were easier for college graduates, so they used it to sell more seats. No one can give you a formula to get a job. You're competing with everyone for a scarce resource. That formula is self defeating. Let's enroll 10000 students and promise all of them that if they are on the top 500 they will be employed at one of the 100 available jobs?

And really, if universities wanted to feed the entrepreneurship engine, they should use their endowments to create funds within their programs, so innovative students could apply for, get some seed funding that is required to actually become a real business and generate a return on the fund.

Then you not only create actual founders, you grow your endowment and you actually evaluate the university on their fund's performance.

You democratize the YC model. I wonder why they haven't tried. Maybe bc they can't actually create founders?

Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders

#332

Post by 59percentmore » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 2:32 PM UTC

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #319

59percentmore wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/s1116…

That's a mischaracterization of the study. The very next sentence:

  However, the standard deviations indicate that there is considerable variation in how students allocate their time to these activities.

Additionally, their data is an "analytical sample" extracted via "weighted random selection" from a larger data set from more than 10 years ago. We don't know how well that sample fit the broader reality a decade ago, let alone today.

That you went fishing for research to support your argument and this is the best you could find is telling.

Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders

#333

Post by neutronicus » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

Juliate wrote: post #315

neutronicus wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I do think ROI is the best lens for trying to explain why something is priced at a substantial fraction of a million dollars.