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I've met and talked to Olin kids, and also been to Olin - this doesn't surprise me one bit. They seem to attract the "maker" type, and also seem to be committed to actually teaching kids how to do things rather than picking kids who already know everything. Everything feels super hands-on and project driven, and the goal is to ship things. They even have classes like products & markets ( http://www.olin.edu/course-li…
Before jumping to conclusions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_small_numbers Edit: Actual Wikipedia entry = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insensitivity_to_sample_size
First, because Olin is ludicrously selective, and second, because Olin only offers founding-friendly majors. I don't think a pre-med intending to become a surgeon should really be faulted for "failing" to start a company, but that's effectively what the article does.
I don't know anything about the topic, but perhaps graduating Stanford offers a broader range of possible jobs than Olin does. Hence in a sense you have less to loose risking starting a company when you're an Olin graduate than a Stanford graduate?
Olin: 1.80% - 4.06%
MIT: 0.71% - 0.81%
Stanford: 0.48% - 0.54%
> Olin College, a small engineering school in Needham, MA, which graduates around 75 students per year So its a tiny college with an emphasis on starting a company? At Stanford your numbers are being diluted by colleges whose student body don't tend to start a company (e.g. humanities, pre-med).
I have looked into controlling for major, but I would need to rework all the data from the Pitchbook report, and I don't have their primary data sources. Surely some founders from those schools come from non-technical majors. If I remove them from the denominator, I'd need to remove them from the numerator as well.
I did start looking at this though, and I don't think it would change the outcome much. At MIT, almost 90% of alumni are in science, math, engineering, and business. At Stanford, it's more than half. So that would change the difference from something like 5x to maybe 2x, and that's without removing the founders of those colleges with non-technical degrees from their list of founders. Harvard might be the more interesting one, where I suspect technical and business degrees are not a clear majority.
But given the wide margin, I don't expect this would change the order of the ranking at all, maybe just my (intentionally) clickbaity headline.
I've met and talked to Olin kids, and also been to Olin - this doesn't surprise me one bit. They seem to attract the "maker" type, and also seem to be committed to actually teaching kids how to do things rather than picking kids who already know everything. Everything feels super hands-on and project driven, and the goal is to ship things. They even have classes like products & markets ( http://www.olin.edu/course-li…
When I was in grad school, I fantasized about finishing my PhD and teaching there.
But frankly, I knew they wouldn't take me :-(
So, imagine an engineering college where you have a very favorable student:teacher ratio plus a 5min walk to a world class entrepreneurship education.
Two comments: 1. First and foremost, go Olin College! It sounds like a really special place where liberal arts and engineering are valued. I wish more colleges followed this model. 2. It's not very surprising and likely a statistical quirk that their per capita founding rate is so high. After reading this piece on why the highest and lowest cancer rates by county in the US are in rural counties, I am seeing this stat…
It's not just random noise. A small population is more impacted by individual events so far there is often reasons for such aberrations.
That is random noise. A small population is impacted far more by noise.

Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just random noise. A small population is more impacted by individual events so far there is often reasons for such aberrations.
> It's not just random noise. A small population is more impacted by individual events so far there is often reasons for such aberrations.  That is random noise. A small population is impacted far more by noise. 
Consider the dean of a tiny school wants to be different where the dean of a large school wants to be better at a wide range of things. The first dean will have a larger impact on a smaller number of things. Further, the dean of the smaller schools choice of focus is going to have a major impact.
I've met and talked to Olin kids, and also been to Olin - this doesn't surprise me one bit. They seem to attract the "maker" type, and also seem to be committed to actually teaching kids how to do things rather than picking kids who already know everything. Everything feels super hands-on and project driven, and the goal is to ship things. They even have classes like products & markets ( http://www.olin.edu/course-li…
Having faculty like Allen B. Downey may contribute to their success. http://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/4828
We first met when he interviewed me as part of Olin's Candidate's Weekend. I told him how impactful the book had been. An hour later, he found me again and gave me a signed physical copy.