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Olin College Produces Founders at Five Times the Rate of Stanford

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Re: Olin College Produces Founders at Five Times the Rate of Stanford

#101

Post by Nanite »

bjacokes wrote: post #100

The small student population at Olin affects the founder rate in a more pertinent way than sample variance: because they only need to admit 100 students, this group of students can be of a higher average quality than if they needed to accept 1000+ students like Stanford/MIT. As an analogy, if YC were to 10x the number of startups they invested in per batch, they'd certainly expect their average return to decrease, be…

I think it would be more useful to compare Olin to another private technology/engineering focussed undergraduate college such as Harvey Mudd.

Re: Olin College Produces Founders at Five Times the Rate of Stanford

#102

Post by ucaetano »

sbierwagen wrote: post #51
arcticfox wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it's not selection bias at all! This result wasn't just drawn out of a 1000-count small college hat, so naive Bayesian priors shouldn't be used here. As an alum, I specifically went to Olin because I thought it would best help me become a successful entrepreneur. Many people do. So my priors are that Olin is likely to do this at a higher rate (since Stanford / MIT etc. have entire swathes of the school not…

>Actually, it's not selection bias at all! [...] As an alum, I specifically went to Olin because I thought it would best help me become a successful entrepreneur. Many people do. From the link: >In other words, what we might have perceived as a difference in education quality was really the product of systematic differences in how the considered populations were put together. The groups we considered had a hidden non…

> As you just stated, entrepreneur-y students self-select into Olin.

Well, the best students self-select into Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, etc.

Re: Olin College Produces Founders at Five Times the Rate of Stanford

#103

Post by valuearb »

CydeWeys wrote: post #93
jacobolus wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stanford also does a good job of helping interested students with those things. It’s just larger and more diverse, and also includes students who want to be judges, literary critics, historians, medical doctors, mathematicians, journalists, school teachers, etc. If you looked only at the subset of Stanford students with similar interests and backgrounds to Olin’s student population, you’d probably end up with a simil…

There's a qualitative difference, though, in being in a place that is full of mostly people who don't share your interests/goals of founding startups (Stanford) versus those who do (Olin). E.g. there's more gay people in Dallas than in San Francisco (owing to population size differences), but the latter is still a much better place to be gay because of the concentration.

Yea, but Stanford has better faculty, better access to startups, and many people value a more well rounded experience.

Re: Olin College Produces Founders at Five Times the Rate of Stanford

#104

Post by gertef »

scott00 wrote: post #87
robrenaud wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you had the data for just the engineering and computer science majors?

I don't understand the question.

Stanford has many majors -- what are the means and interval sizes per Stanford major?

Re: Olin College Produces Founders at Five Times the Rate of Stanford

#105

Post by jostmey »

sbierwagen wrote: post #31

(squeezing eyes shut and focusing my psychic powers) This college I've never heard of will turn out to have tiny enrollment, and the entire effect size will be selection bias + random noise. >Olin College, a small engineering school in Needham, MA, which graduates around 75 students per year, turns out an alumni population where 2.77% of alumni found a successfully venture-backed startup, more than five times the rat…

And maybe that's how you end up with the harvards and yales. The initial reputation is luck and the schools coast on it. Smart talented people attend but maybe they were going to succeed anyway

Re: Olin College Produces Founders at Five Times the Rate of Stanford

#106

Post by [deleted] »

blfr wrote: post #49
sbierwagen wrote: post #31

(squeezing eyes shut and focusing my psychic powers) This college I've never heard of will turn out to have tiny enrollment, and the entire effect size will be selection bias + random noise. >Olin College, a small engineering school in Needham, MA, which graduates around 75 students per year, turns out an alumni population where 2.77% of alumni found a successfully venture-backed startup, more than five times the rat…

Tiny enrolment is a good point but selection bias is not. You could easily argue that virtually all of college effects are selection effects.

[deleted]

Re: Olin College Produces Founders at Five Times the Rate of Stanford

#107

Post by keerthiko »

Nanite wrote: post #101
bjacokes wrote: post #100

The small student population at Olin affects the founder rate in a more pertinent way than sample variance: because they only need to admit 100 students, this group of students can be of a higher average quality than if they needed to accept 1000+ students like Stanford/MIT. As an analogy, if YC were to 10x the number of startups they invested in per batch, they'd certainly expect their average return to decrease, be…

I think it would be more useful to compare Olin to another private technology/engineering focussed undergraduate college such as Harvey Mudd.

That is implicit in the studies done in the paper, in that Cooper Union, Harvey Mudd, etc don't figure in the top universities that follow after Olin on these metrics.

Re: Olin College Produces Founders at Five Times the Rate of Stanford

#108

Post by mathattack »

sbierwagen wrote: post #31

(squeezing eyes shut and focusing my psychic powers) This college I've never heard of will turn out to have tiny enrollment, and the entire effect size will be selection bias + random noise. >Olin College, a small engineering school in Needham, MA, which graduates around 75 students per year, turns out an alumni population where 2.77% of alumni found a successfully venture-backed startup, more than five times the rat…

That might be extreme. We'd expect the largest density to come from a small school, but Olin also as the benefit of being 100% engineers with much less debt than comparable schools. That contributes a lot too.

If it were purely size plus noise there would be a few other weird schools on the list.

The bigger question isn't funding, it's how they'll do. No unicorns yet, let alone massive exits. Win the market share for that, and I'll really be impressed.

Re: Olin College Produces Founders at Five Times the Rate of Stanford

#109

Post by scott00 »

gertef wrote: post #104
scott00 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the question.

Stanford has many majors -- what are the means and interval sizes per Stanford major?

That's a good question, but I don't have the data to answer it.

Re: Olin College Produces Founders at Five Times the Rate of Stanford

#110

Post by BeetleB »

bllguo wrote: post #85
pbiggar wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you care to provide evidence for your aggressively-worded comment?

Hypothesis 3 - that alumni or faculty are supportive - applies to any number of schools. Need more to show this is a distinguishing factor. Hypothesis 2 - the school encourages growth and "spiral learning" - is vague. Going to need more evidence to prove this is a unique characteristic of Olin. Hypothesis 1 - the school attracts students with a certain risk profile - is precisely the parent's point about selection bi…

Your requests for info are fair, but for 2 and 3, it's not hard to find hints of evidence with a mere Google search.

I did not go to Olin, but knew about them from when they were fairly new. Their very existence from the first day has been to produce entrepreneurial students, and their curriculum has always reflected that. IIRC, they don't separate courses based on "engineering" and "entrepreneurship". They aim for every course they teach to be a mix of both. Very few pure "theory" courses. Taking a course in communications? You will learn both the theory (Shannon, etc) and you better build something significant by the end of the semester.

Honestly, from the comments here, I'm surprised at the level of doubt. I thought more people here would be familiar with Olin.

(None of this is to say that they are or are not effective in 2 & 3, but it is a foundational principle of theirs, and I imagine a metric they track - as opposed to typical top schools that claim 3 but are pretty bad at it).

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