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Comment by baron816 | Hacker News Reader

Startup idea: unbundle the party aspect of college. That kind of social life is not something you could purchase elsewhere right now. Figuring out how to replicate it would be worth a lot of money to a lot of people.

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The problem is that the "party aspect" only works because it's bundled. "I'm going to spend the next four years of my life partying" is not the kind of decision that parents and society are likely to subsidize.

True. That format can’t be extracted in its entirety. But what kind of format could? I don’t think it would need to apply to only 18-22 year olds.

A lot of it is more valuable to young adults, who are still developing future social, professional, and romantic connections. Once you already have those connections, it's a fundamentally different problem--especially if one of the romantic connections works out and you end up married, maybe even having kids.

And frankly any environment where you put together large numbers of young adults will probably result in "partying" if they have enough time and space to do so. There's a reason that drunken sailors staggering back from shore leave are a centuries-old cliche.

Agreed. But perhaps it could be bundled with something else, like working remotely as a junior engineer at a startup for min wage < x < SF CS grad comp.

Peter Thiel called college a "consumption choice", and I think he is at least partially right about that.

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