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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

#91

Post by btilly »

koolba wrote: post #44
cjbprime wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

With enough tiny schools you can find outliers for anything. Give me the stats and I'll show you why a seemingly random school is the epicenter of modern opioid addiction.

There aren't enough tiny schools to explain this result.

The p-value against this result if this school was as good as Stanford by pure chance is 1/10k. There are only 3k 4 year colleges in the USA. The vast majority of which are significantly worse than Stanford.

It is therefore extremely unlikely that pure chance alone would explain this data point.

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

#92

Post by pessimizer »

jwq1 wrote: post #82
ComradeTaco wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absolutely selection bias. Compare averages by major for each school, not the total population for each school. To compare a college that produces almost exclusively engineering majors to a university that offers everything from constitutional law to communications is absurd.

To say, “it is absolutely selection bias,” infers the professors and curriculum of the school had no effect on the ability of students to become successful, venture-backed entrepreneurs. Which you cannot conclude given the data. What you have experienced is confirmation-bias. Whereby, you have interpreted evidence to reaffirm your own beliefs. In this case, your belief is, “Olin College cannot be better than MIT, Har…

To say "it is absolutely selection bias," you have to include Harvard poetry majors in the comparison, which they did. Why so condescending?

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

#93

Post by CydeWeys »

jacobolus wrote: post #83
jwq1 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is like saying, people who self-select to go to the physics department go there only to be with other physics students are and that it, "doesn't have anything to do with the teachers, [or] the curriculum." What is more likely, is the school does an excellent job affording students the opportunity found successful, venture-backed companies. Similar to the way the Physics professors and curriculum afford physicist…

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.

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

#94

Post by Spooky23 »

Tuxer wrote: post #57
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…

"it's not selection bias at all" "I specifically went to Olin because I thought it would best help me become a successful entrepreneur" choose one

So would a conclusion that "most sports fans who watch TV watch ESPN" be selection bias?

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

#95

Post by luckydude »

graphitezepp wrote: post #86
luckydude wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind, can I ask a question about Olin? It looks like it's full of cool kids that make stuff and go on to make more stuff. My guess is that they only accept kids with a track record of making stuff, like the kids that are in the robotics club. I've got a sharp kid who I would like to turn into a maker kid but he's currently not that kid. He's a math guy, wants to try and get a PhD in math. I'd be happier…

Unrelated, but as someone who has experienced much distress over what my parents would be 'happy for me to be' I find that language super creepy. DEFINITELY not trying to attack you or even suggest that what I am about to say is the case for you, just saying I hear that language and go straight to the image of someone projecting their own desires onto someone else possibly to their detriment.

Yeah, you are right. I certainly wasn't trying to be creepy and you can rest easy that I haven't pushed my kids like I was pushed (in fact the kid in question regrets that I didn't push him).

I just am dismayed that my kids don't build stuff. Building stuff has brought me so much pleasure and satisfaction. I want that for them, for their happiness, not mine. I'll be gone one day and I want them to be good whatever they do.

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

#98

Post by beambot »

epalmer wrote: post #42
saalweachter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

They are working with larger engineering schools to bring some of their learnings to the other schools. http://www.olin.edu/news-events/2013/olin-insper-collaborate... https://engineering.illinois.edu/news/article/2009-10-14-oli... http://www.olin.edu/news-events/2013/university-texas-el-pas... Project Based Education can scale. It just takes effort.

With ballooning administrative ratios... it's probably not as much effort as one would think. It just requires the University to focus on education rather than administration.

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

#100

Post by bjacokes »

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, because the last company they accept will be less likely to succeed than the first or tenth.

If you really wanted to measure how Olin's teaching compares to that of MIT/Stanford, vis-a-vis startup founding success, you could have the other schools "draft" a team of 100 CS students at the beginning of their freshman year, and measure the founding success rate of only those 100 students.

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