Olin College Produces Founders at Five Times the Rate of Stanford

(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 rate of Stanford (0.51%), MIT (0.75%), Harvard (0.28%),

Wow, who would have guessed.

https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/03/29/why-selection-bias-is-t...

Two thoughts:

1. If you're graduating highschool and want nothing more than to start an engineering company, and you have the credentials to get into Olin, it is probably worth-while. The social network you'll acquire at Olin will be far more tuned to startups, with a lot of former & current startup founders, VCs, and people really interested in being an early employee at a startup.

2. Whatever Olin is doing right probably doesn't scale to a significantly larger school. If you went from graduating 75 students / year to 1000, you'd lose close contact with the awesome teachers and mentors, your social network would become much more diffuse (right now you could easily know every person in your class, the class before, and the class after yours), and the friendly VCs wouldn't be able to meet and learn about every student and their aspirations.

Olin alumni here. First of all this is an incredible survey of what Oliners have been able to achieve so far! Huge thanks to Lee & others for putting this together.

I've been a huge fan of Olin's educational model and am proud to have turned down Stanford to go there. From the very first day you get to Olin, you're immediately immersed in a collaborative, figure-it-out-together, project-based environment where failure happens and there's no ceiling to the scope of what you can do.

They also try harder than any curriculum I've seen to really ingrain the importance of an entrepreneurial mindset and user-centered design thinking throughout the program. For example, all sophomores are required to take a set of design classes that forces you (though much struggling) to emphasize the viability and desirability, not just the feasibility, of everything you do. Most classes make you to orally present and really communicate your ideas to an intentionally skeptical audience.

By the time you graduate, many begin to realize how well this actually prepares you to not just make cool things, but also structurally think about what people want and how to realistically make it viably work in the real world.

The tech industry notices as well. Oliners have had an extremely strong tract record, particularly in product management programs, at most of the big companies. If you're a PM at Google, Facebook, or Microsoft, you likely know an Oliner, which given a graduating class 80ish, is pretty good reach. Big company PM programs are also not foreigners to producing a lot of entrepreneurs and I've found many of the skills we were taught in college come around again and again in this industry. These skills are also highly prized by places like HBS, where a disproportionate number of Oliners also find themselves right after graduating.

Right now, we definitely play the law-of-small-numbers game. The school is very new (first class was 2006) and the class sizes intentionally small. The size is limited to ensure Olin can continue to be a laboratory for education pedagogy. Over time, however, I'm definitely optimistic this trend will only continue and I'm prod to have known several of the people mentioned in this article.

Olin alumni here. Having Babson nearby definitely added to my experience. I was intensely interested in entrepreneurship during school, and took several Babson classes.

They're definitely very different and independent schools, however. While I have several friends from Babson, my social & professional life has drifted away from there. Of the companies mentioned in the article a handful of them (like Big Belly) are the results of fruitful Olin-Babson collaborations. The majority of companies that come out of the two schools, however, have had less cross-campus collaboration than I think many would like.

Sorry, I guess I'm being slow -- I get that the sample size is too small to confirm the effect, but I'm not seeing where the selection bias is.

Is it that the type of people who would be attracted to founding a startup are more likely to apply/be accepted to Olin than Stanford? That seems to confirm the original article's thesis rather than invalidate it, in my eyes, so I don't expect that's what you're thinking..