Olin College Produces Founders at Five Times the Rate of Stanford | Hacker News Reader

Olin College Produces Founders at Five Times the Rate of Stanford

blog.ledwards.com

219 pointsnertzy116 comments

(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...

2/75 = 0.027

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.

One source of bias here: there are lots of small schools, chances are high that one of them will exhibit a large number of founders due to noise, and this will be the one picked up by the report cited.

It's possible that Olin exclusively having engineering degrees produces a bias. Stanford has a significant population who study subjects that do not aid in pursuing a career in entrepreneurship.

If you assume that, out of all the students who applied to Olin, only 70 were entrepreneur-y, then a class size of 75 would capture all of them, and Olin would have an impressive number of successful entrepreneurs among its alumni.

But it doesn't scale. If you made Olin accept ten times as many students, then its numbers would regress to the mean.

I asked my cofounder about this (she's mentioned in the article). She said "This occurred to us. We're a school of engineers - we talk about sample sizes a lot"?

Here's her thoughts on why it's not just sample size: https://twitter.com/ellenchisa/status/905448602142572545

None of her arguments make any sense. Most apply to any school.

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 bias. There is a healthy discussion of this above.

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).

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 interested in entrepreneurship at all); this evidence makes that seem overwhelmingly likely now.

Consider evaluating all the departments of a school and finding out that one of the smallest turns out the highest percentage of high-energy physicists. Selection bias? Nope, just the high-energy physics department.

>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-random distribution. This is selection bias.

As you just stated, entrepreneur-y students self-select into Olin. The fact the school produces entrepreneurs doesn't have anything to do with the teachers, the curriculum, or the chemicals Olin puts in the drinking water. It's the non-random distribution of students.

It depends what the conclusion in question is, whether selection bias is a factor.

Does Olin produce / graduate founders at ~5 times the rate of Stanford? Yes - no bias.

Is the effect size due to self-selection? Likely at least partially.

If by "partially" you mean "entirely" I agree.

I don't agree, I think it's more likely than not that a school specifically designed to foster a particular type of thinking is at least somewhat more effective at it than others. Just like Stanford is likely more effective at developing elite researchers.

I don't think there's nearly enough information to determine that confidently, but we're simply talking about beliefs at this point.

Doubling down on this point, there are undoubtably people who went to Olin not planning to be a founder, who decided to be because they knew someone else who was a good role-model for them.

This is not dissimilar from the old boy network that makes Washington and Lee the single university which most increases your median earning potential. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Magazine%27s_Lis... for where I got that from.)

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 physicists the ability to be good at physics.

The fact the article highlights this opportunity for other entrepreneurially minded people, who may want to attend in the future, is exactly what the data in the article is supposed to do.

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 similar distribution of outcomes.

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.

no, it's called respecting the null hypothesis when making outrageous claims.

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

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

"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

It depends which conclusion is being questioned.

arcticfox is probably referring to the title conclusion "Olin College Produces Founders at Five Time the Rate of Stanford" not being the result of selection bias during the analysis phase (as implied for example in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15184748).

The conclusion "Olin College is more effective at turning people into founders than Stanford" is indeed a far more speculative conclusion due to self-selection.

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

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, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and the like because those schools are the best.”

When you allow yourself to succumb to confirmation bias, you close yourself off to the possibility there is a school which prepares students for an entrepreneurial life. Please do not close others off to the same possibility.

I never wrote that MIT, Harvard, Stanford and Yale are better than Olin. What I did say was that you should compare apples to apples, compare average start up rate for majors at Olin to the same majors at MIT, Yale, Stanford and Harvard.

Right now most startups are tech heavy. If you have a school with exclusively engineering and technology majors, you're much more likely to have a higher startup rate then a full university.

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

The FIRST Robotics Team I helped out with has sent three students to Olin so far, with more interested. So not only are these students who self-select, but Olin is getting students who've already had an aggressive, entrepreneurial Engineering project under the belts. Our team has sent students to lots of other Engineering schools, but my sense is that Olin is particularly dense with motivated students.

The incoming class of 2021 http://www.olin.edu/blog/olin-admission/post/welcome-class-2...

"And you love robotics! Which makes so much sense- we are Olin after all!- over half of you participated in competitive robotics in high school."

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

I've regularly heard good things of Olin College in the past years, especially when it comes to teaching CS early to all engineering students. Was not surprised to read this headline, but have never met any grads personally.

Well, it's easy to dismiss. Do you have anything substantive to add to the discussion?

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

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.

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-listing/ahse1515-products-and-mar...), integrated product design (http://www.olin.edu/course-listing/engr3250-integrated-produ...). The focus really seems to be industry and entrepreneurship rather than academia. My own school (WPI) also has a similar approach to classwork, and it works, but I don't think is as good as preparing students for business as Olin seems to be.

Having faculty like Allen B. Downey may contribute to their success.

http://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/4828

As a former student of Allen's, I wholeheartedly agree. I actually started learning programming from him before even arriving at Olin, through his free textbooks (available here: http://greenteapress.com/wp/).

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.

I've had a chance to read his books and talk with him. Amazing. down to earth and brilliant at the same time.

>I've met and talked to Olin kids, and also been to Olin - this doesn't surprise me one bit.

When I was in grad school, I fantasized about finishing my PhD and teaching there.

But frankly, I knew they wouldn't take me :-(

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 statistical phenomenon everywhere: https://books.google.com/books?id=JRueDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA14&lpg=P...

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.

I would not call a nearby chemical dump 'random 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.

> 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).

Agreed. It's a pretty silly oversight by the author. And a meaningless measure.

What if the segment of Stanford students whose area of study is comparable to that of Olin? What would the ratio be then?

The college encourages an entrepreneurial attitude, but is not focused explicitly on getting alumni to start companies. But you do see a lot of Olin alumni joining early startups as well as big companies. Google was the largest employer of Olin alumni in the first two years (2006-2007), mostly through the new-at-the-time APM program. A few years later, it was Microsoft. Now Pivotal is high up the list. You also see Olin alumni joining early startups that they did not found as early employees (Square, AirBnB, Adroll off the top of my head).

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.

when you say "Google was the largest employer of Olin alumni" do you mean like, what, 3 to 10 people? Its too small to even compare to Stanford. Its apples to appleseeds.

I mean it sounds like a great school, kudos to the staff, but its a silly comparison.

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.

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.

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

This. This article is one of those "Hey this area is the area with the lowest cancer rates".

But statistics tells us that small samples are more prone to extreme outcomes.

This seems to be a problem in all scientific fields, a quick google search came up with this article from Nature: https://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/full/nrn3475.html?...

I was going to say the same thing.

But that said, I've got a kid looking at colleges and I'm gonna suggest he look at Olin.

Olin alum here (and one of the listed founders). The bigger impact of the small graduating class size in this case, rather than extreme statistical outcomes is powerful network effects.

You're more likely to think something a large percentage of your cohort (and people you closely know personally) goes and does is cool, doable and worthwhile. A chunk of your peers at Olin will go found meaningful companies (startups or "just" businesses) and you will think of taking it up too. I never considered being a founder before going, or even most of my life attending Olin, but it became something I considered very seriously and eventually diving into after graduating, and needless to say best choice of my life.

The other cool thing is even if you don't start your own company, you are part of such a small and tight-knit community with all these founders, and founders-to-be! I have personally worked on projects, lived, or had drinks with all but 3 of the founders mentioned in this article, and I am definitely one of the more introverted people who went there.

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 for him if he became a maker of things, that's what I am and it's worked out well for me, both financially and it was satisfying.

So I'm wondering if Olin would take on a kid and try and form them into a maker or is that just asking way too much. His GPA is so so, 3.6 something, his ACT is 32 I think, I know the math part was 34. That was his only try at the ACT, he can do better. He's taking a gap year and working on retaking the ACT, he's shooting for a 34-35 overall.

Thanks for any insight and congrats on going to that college, it looks sweet!

Olin alum here - in my graduating class (2013), a majority seemed to have experience "making things" when we entered Olin but there was also a large contingent that was super passionate about and actively pursuing non-engineering activities. I think the admissions teams looks more for passion/hustle/doers than "makers".

The simple answer is: your kid should definitely apply.

1) To be completely honest I can't speak to the current admission climate and criteria, I enrolled in 2007 with the 5th class. Things have likely changed a lot (they do when the institute is that young and application and admission demographics change rapidly at this age).

2) Myself, I grew up in a quiet conservative Middle Eastern city (first international cohort rep!), never "made" things that I could put on a resume, and mostly just had solid grades in math/sci/compsci. I had solid SAT scores, never took the ACT, and my GPA was hard to translate (I didn't attend an AP/IB curriculum) for direct comparisons. The admissions team emphasizes that individual scores are of low relevance, as are aggregate GPAs -- Olin is primarily looking for kids who show a passion and/or aptitude in STEM/entrepreneurship which can't always be represented by scores. This is why the final stage of the admission process is a weekend-long in-person interview+team builds+campus tours where they (and you) try to evaluate whether you will survive/flourish/despise Olin's pedagogical practices, and this is ultimately the deciding factor. Parents are welcome.

3) As Olin grows older, the graduating classes have polarized more and more into founders, and pure scientists. My class ('11) had ~35% join PhD programs in everything from solar power to cancer biology, over half with prestigious grants such as NSF. And more people are becoming not only founders, but embarking on various philanthropic and/or entrepreneurial journeys, from SV startups to building solar cookers in West Africa. This is a shift away from joining Google/Microsoft/Facebook/IBM/etc, which clumped was previously the largest cohort of a graduating class (and has shrunk to ~20% now).

The hypothesis is that both these people are actually the same -- they absorb skills, look at the world, try to reason from first principles and their recently gained knowledge whether something could/should exist and improve human lives, and then just goes and does it. Pure academics is the long-term pursuit of human improvement, contributing to the greater corpus of human awareness, and entrepreneurship/makerhood is the near-term, fast-moving version. They are just essentially the same mindset applied on different timeframes.

My point is that I think you shouldn't worry about which of these perspectives he pursues at this point -- if he's the kind of kid who'll like it at Olin (he may not), the path he'll eventually take will be influenced by where he feels he can contribute the most effectively. Olin will give him some exposure to more people on the maker-side of that spectrum.

http://www.olin.edu/blog/olin-admission/post/welcome-class-2...

They should apply. Many are not makers or robotics. Smart kinds with grit, determination and a willingness to fail to succeed.

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.

Absolutely apply. We have a bunch of people that don't really care about physical stuff at all, and would rather just think about the problems.

That said, the classes aren't going to all be about math and only math, a lot of classes have physical projects. But the projects are tightly integrated with theory. I learned multivariable calculus by modeling a boat with some curves, and then building the boat out of foam to see if the calculated angle at which it tips was the same as reality.

If you kid can get excited about project-based learning, Olin is an awesome option.

I'd be happy to talk to you more if you have more questions.

Not just that - it's also sample bias twice over.

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.

Well, pick one. Either there's a cause, or there's no cause. Either they're full of shit, or they deliberately did this. You can't credibly claim both to dismiss them.

Well, pick one.

Pick one of what?

I'm not talking about whether Olin is a good school, it obviously is. I'm saying that "rate of company founding" is a nonsensical axis of comparison. It's like noting that Olin produces 100% fewer Stanford grads than Stanford does.

Not surprising. I've met some Olin kids (I helped teach a session of their product design & development class) and they are some of the most impressive college students I've ever encountered. They tend to take feedback extremely well, and are genuinely interested in creating useful things for people.

Whatever they're doing over there, I hope they keep it up.

All of the commenters might find this useful.

Olin outcomes for the class of 2017 http://www.olin.edu/blog/career-and-graduate-stories/post/co...

Olin is trying to reinvent engineering education for this century. They did locate at the edge of Babson college because they think that having business knowledge is important. The student can take classes at Wellesley and they think that is important also. aka Liberal Arts.

The are working to export their engineering education successes. I can't find a link that explains that right now but they want to change engineering education widely.

They are selective. They require an onsite interview and observed team work after you have been academically qualified. They want students with grit, that know have to reflect, and students that know success comes via failure. You can read about the incoming class of 2021 here: http://www.olin.edu/blog/olin-admission/post/welcome-class-2...

Full disclosure: My youngest daughter is a first year 2021 student. She is not a start up kind of person but she iterates toward success via failure and has 4 years of FLL experience, 6 years of FRC experience and 2 years of FTC. She has assembled a 3D printer, written a state law that funds after school STEM (it passed and was funded) and worked with underserved middle schools on after school STEM enrichment for a year between HS and College (gap year). Yes I am proud.

FLL - First Lego League FTC - First Tech Challenge FRC - First Robotics Competition

I have a engineering degree and a pure science degree. I would die and go to heaven if I could go to Olin. And yes Dr. Allen Downey is amazing. I have spoken with him when he visited the university I work at, read several of his books and my daughter has already had classes with him teaching Modeling and Simulations with Python.

An important omission is that Olin is on the same property as Babson, one if the top entrepreneurship schools in the country. Olin kids can attend Babson classes and have access to Babson resources.

So, imagine an engineering college where you have a very favorable student:teacher ratio plus a 5min walk to a world class entrepreneurship education.

I went to babson, took a few classes at olin, my thesis advisor was an olin grad.

Many of the olin students are brilliant, quirky, very progressive, want to give back with their high quality (and what used to be 100% fully funded from endowments and grants, think its 50% now) education. Think this is a large point that gets overlooked - graduate an engineering degree debt free and it is easier to give back through a start up or social venture :)

Huge emphasis on actually building things in capstone classes. Fantastic faculty and amazing machine shop resources for such a small school. Some of the best students in my negotiations and accounting classes were from Olin. Additionally wellesley college is a 10 min bus ride for access to top-notch liberal arts classes. Lucky to have that mixture for sure.

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.

Hey I'm Lee, the author of this article. I think there are a lot of fair callouts about controlling for major, sample size, selection bias, and others, so I collected my response to those concerns here: https://blog.ledwards.com/methods-for-determining-startup-de... and linked to this follow-up article at the top of the original. Really appreciate the comments and feedback, and happy to hear more.

I'm sure this won't satisfy everyone, but I wanted to do this analysis now instead of in 40 years, so I had to work with the data I do have. I think this is enough to show at least directionally that Olin is doing a reasonably good job at producing startup founders, though as I raise myself at the end of this article, we won't know for sure until we have some exits and long-term value creation in the future.

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.

Other college alumni here. Nothing I learned in college has helped me to the place where I am. And I do not want to be classified by the college I graduated from. I stayed for four years and I graduated. I am learning new technologies everyday and I am doing very well on my own. I simply do not care what people in tech giants think about my school.

> Nothing I learned in college has helped me to the place where I am.

:( That's too bad, I hope they change something. Certainly some people will never benefit from organized learning, and perhaps you're in that category and it's otherwise a great school, but most people aren't like that.

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.

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.

95% confidence intervals for those curious about the statistical significance given the small Olin sample size:

Olin: 1.80% - 4.06%

MIT: 0.71% - 0.81%

Stanford: 0.48% - 0.54%

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?

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

Olin is on to something with their fresh take on engineering education. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXNT-RRcfyo

If Olin's small numbers are skewed by a few founder types moreso than the large numbers of Stanford, and you wanted to be a founder type, wouldn't you stand a chance of learning more from your peers by going to Olin?

I don't see why people are arguing that selectivity and small size invalidate the better quality of Olin's education. I learned as much from my peers as from my teachers, not to mention the motivation of peer competition.

As an adult wishing to go back to school for an engineering degree, is there anything on earth comparable to a program like Olin? I really have no interest in sitting through 500 person lectures at a traditional university with no focus on hands on work and a "sink or swim" academic mentality. Are there any integrated schools out there friendly to non-traditional students that teach from the ground up?

Perhaps the larger percentage of founders has more to do with the substantially smaller student body and shorter track record of the university. Daniel Kahneman touches on this phenomenon in "Thinking Fast and Slow".

Yes, I was thinking about the law of small numbers too ! Pretty sure the college with the smallest rate of startup founders is also a small college.

Whether venture-backed or not:

A startup does not always equal a business.

Unfortunately we now live in a mindset where the ability to raise capital is the yardstick of success. The yardstick of a business, however, has never changed. It's profit.

How many of these ventures are actually profitable? Not to hate on the school, but if the companies are not profitable then they are basically being taught how to raise capital, not how to run a business. They could be producing Clinkles and Juiceros. Remember that VC funding is also just a gamble that they may make it. Statistically most VC-backed companies don't make it. So that alone should not be a measure of success.

I think a better stat would be percentage of startups out of a school that make it to profitability. Take the NBA 3-point approach. You have to have a minimum number of attempts to be considered. Likewise, a school would have to have a minimum number of startups to come out of it. Then from there you measure the percentage of those startups that are profitable after some agreed upon average age.

Amusingly, I'm an Olin grad with a profitable lifestyle business that I started, so I wasn't included in this stat. I wholeheartedly agree with you on goals and values. Fortunately, Olin isn't a "VC startup factory", but that could have easily been the case from the data presented in the article.

I know someone attending Olin. She will graduate with $300,000 in student loans and a degree good for a median salary of $85K. In my mind this is financial slavery.

A small percentage of a small percentage of graduates might succeed in business. This does not mean they will be wealthy. Some? Maybe. All? Not likely. Which means most will face a lifetime of paying on outrageous student debt that might prevent them from such things as buying a home and saving for retirement. Thirty years of financial slavery isn't a good way to go through life.

I simply can't reconcile this reality with the article.

Perhaps this is a different Olin school? (There are a number of universities with Olin schools or colleges on them.) The current cost of attending Olin before factoring in the half-tuition scholarship is $71,825 (see http://www.olin.edu/admission/costs/cost-of-attendance/). After including the half-tuition scholarship, which all students receive, costs drop to $47,525 per year. I'm not sure where an extra $100K in student loans would be coming from. Additionally, Olin provides need-based aid for those who qualify.

$50K for six years = You walk away with a $300K Masters which entitles you to a median salary of somewhere around $80K a year. Even if you go for a Bachelors (a mistake if you ask me) you'd walk away with $200K in debt, which is just as insane given the lower earning potential.

Payments are approximately as follows:

Pay it off in 20 years: $2,100 per month

Pay it off in 30 years: $1,800 per month

This means you'll pay somewhere around $504K to $648K.

If your gross pay is $100K per year that means that, in very rough terms, in California, your effective take-home pay is about $64K per year or $5,333 per month.

Out of that you need to take $2,000 every month for 20 to 30 years and pay your student loan.

That leaves you with $3,333/mo to live.

Median rent for a one bedroom apartment in Los Angeles is $2,000/mo.

You are down to $1,333.

It is nearly impossible to live without a car in a place like Los Angeles. Buy a crappy car and pay for car, gas and insurance. That will easily set you back $500 a month.

Now we are down to $833.

Food, say, about $400 a month.

Down to $433.

Utilities, well, let's say $250/mo to be kind.

Down to $183.

I am not accounting for buying clothes, toilet paper, toothpaste, furniture an occasional outing, etc.

Forget travel. Forget investing. Forget saving.

If you need health insurance you are screwed.

And that, right there, is a formula for financial slavery and pain for decades.

It also means you will almost never buy a house (in CA) unless you get married and your spouse does not come in with massive student loan debt like you. You might want to eliminate all your social interactions at Olin or risk marrying someone with $200K to $300K in debt, just like you.

Not zeroing in on Olin here. We have lots of universities that cost in the range of $40K to $60K a year. In Olin's case the article says that about 3% of the roughly 75 graduates every year become entrepreneurs (not necessarily successful). This means that fully 72 graduates do not. And they get out of there with what can only be described as massive unmanageable debt.

Certain degree programs, such as Mechanical Engineering, simply don't have high earning potential. Someone graduating with $300K in debt and one of these degrees in hand is starting life with a formula for suffering. There are plenty of reasonably priced schools that could cut the cost of these degrees in half and even less.

From my perspective, going to a place like Olin is a terrible mistake. It does not guarantee financial success. The only thing it guarantees is financial hardship. It's an example of how demented things have become due to just how easy it is to get student loans.

Well, perhaps ...

1. There is more opportunity for Stanford students to pursue graduate degrees, leading many to forgo the entrepreneurial route

2. Stanford students receive better job offers upon graduation, leading many to forgo the entrepreneurial route

3. Stanford attracts more international students who come from countries less encouraging of entrepreneurship

Regarding the first two, I could probably think of 10 more positive reasons the numbers might be what they are. What's perceived as a positive for Olin may actually be due to an inarguably positive thing for Stanford

1. Surprisingly, students from small private colleges like Olin are more likely to pursue graduate degrees. IDK if this holds for Olin specifically.

2. Olin is a great school. I doubt undergraduates from Olin are paid substantially differently from those at Stanford. There is probably data on this.

3. Seems the most likely explanation. Or just random chance.

Exactly, all 3 of your conclusions are true :)

1) My class had 30+% go into PhD programs, with over half of them receiving Fulbright/NSF/comparable prestigious research grants.

2) Earlier Olin classes graduated a larger percentage of people to take on high-paying jobs at Google/MS/IBM (and later FB/Twitter). It has shifted towards more academia and entrepreneurs

3) As one of (only) four international students in the first class (5% of the incoming class), yes, fewer international students. Yes, international students come from cultures less encouraging of entrepreneurship. While I'm definitely from one of those, being at Olin brought me around to entrepreneurship -- I wasn't interested until nearing graduation, reinforcing the article's point that Olin nurtures and graduates founders more effectively than other schools. I would almost certainly have worked a high-paying software dev job if I attended Stanford instead.

Perhaps, but regarding the first 2...

1. Top graduate schools for Olin grads (in order): MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, UC-Berkeley, Cornell. It doesn't seem like people that want to go to grad school are struggling for opportunity.

2. Top employers (in order) for Olin grads: Google, Microsoft, athenahealth, Apple. I'm not sure a better list could be drawn up over the past few years.

http://www.olin.edu/collaborate/careers-graduate-studies/res...

I think [3] could be quite true, and I'm sure there are other potential explanations as well.

Putting this one on the suggest/visit list for my son, definitely.

If you visit make make sure to walk through the academic building. Yes only one such building. That is where you will find the students, usually on the floor, with their project, in the halls, everywhere. Giant post-it notes all over the walls.

My wife and youngest visited in 2015. She is now a first year their. She did a gap year.

A university should not focus on producing founders but to teach scientific working and after all enabling research. If people found their own companies - nice. If not, doesn't matter.

Also nice for Olin College to produce so many companies but Stanford's history did not only produce tons of companies but also this place known these days as Silicon Valley (there is no way SV would be the place it is toady without Stanford).

Some things to consider from this article.

1. Olin gives free tuition or reduced tuition leading to almost no debt. There is probably a positive correlation with not having school debt and starting companies.

2. Olin has a very small population size. The best and the worst cases can always be found in small sample sizes.

3. Schools such as Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, etc. have a wide range of students with wide range of interests. Most people do not go to these schools with the sole purpose of being an entrepreneur. There are many people that become doctors, writers, researchers, etc. and benefit society in other ways. Measuring just one narrow dimension may be understating contribution in other places.

4. Olin seems like a great place. It's small enough and independent enough to take chances in how it educates its students. Most older and more prestigious are more conservative in their teaching methods. Since Olin is fully endowed by one person with an open vision, they are able to do things that other institutions cannot.

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?

This is definitely the case, in that Stanford offers lots of degrees not at all on founding "tracks". Doctors, theoretical physicists, etc are not somehow failed founders, they're doing a completely different thing with their lives. By being engineering-specific, Olin is totally incomparable to Stanford on this axis.

https://npc.collegeboard.org/student/app/olin

is an interesting calculator

plugging in $150K combined income it indicated that hypothetical college age child would pay $44,906 a year to attend

for contrast, given the SAT range of 1470-1550 http://www.olin.edu/admission/class-profiles/2021/

https://scholarships.ua.edu/types/out-of-state.php

I'd like to see this correlated with family income and other factors before attributing it solely to Olin.

Also, this was written by an Olin alumnus.

This isn't a fair comparison, for it to be fair we would need to compare Olin to the Engineering and CS departments at Stanford.

What are the founder rates of Stanford grads with the three degrees given by Olin College?

sampling bias at work -- the smaller a college is (and the more small colleges you sample), the higher your chances of finding one with better percentages, in pretty much anything

Cool but is it statistically significant ?

Sometimes I think that startup is for those who have nothing to lose. Kids in Stanford probably have weighted their feasible career more than a free throw.

It is also strange to me this Olin School is trying to beat Stanford with a single statistics. What are they trying to do here? To prove they are better than Stanford? Or to let kids dropping out of Stanford and apply to them? Or to make a fame by taking on a particularly prestigious school?

This is what I know. In the tech startup world, nobody cares where you graduated. Whether it is Olin or Stan, it doesn't matter.

Olin is just educating people.

You seem to be projecting quite a bit.

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