YC: The new grad school | Hacker News Reader

YC: The new grad school

mattbrezina.com

165 pointsbrezina54 comments

This is dubious; the whole "higher education vs. entrepreneurship" discourse is a false dichotomy. What has happened is that capitalism has degraded most peoples' perceptions of the goals of higher education: they think it is meant to give them skills for a job or something. Higher education is meant to transform the student's ability to think, such that they can contribute truly new knowledge to society. This often involves less than spectacular monetary compensation for long and painful hours.

The tension between the job training mission imposed by a capitalist society and the more traditional humanist "transformational" mission has watered down the educational system.

As someone who chose education for the sake of education with my eyes wide open and not expecting much in the way of dollars afterward, I applaud the decisions of entrepreneurs to recognize the mission confusion of colleges and simply leave.

Institutions should be like UNIX programs: they should do one thing and do it well. I think that it would be in everyone's best interest to pull job training right out of colleges and use the YC model.

The humanist tradition of education is rich kids hanging out with scholars. That's how universities got started: rich kids, hanging out in fashionable cities, paying scholars a small fee to attend private seminars. "Lecturers" were people paid to read a book aloud to a large group. And so on.

The "capitalist" idea of education is actually a demotic idea of education: that the non rich kid can also attend the same scholars and get their money back some day. That model is well-entrenched because most kids attending are middle class.

Rich kids can still get an education for its own sake, if they want it.

You're conflating a few things here. This is certainly how higher education started, but in many places it has not remained that way. Some European democracies have made higher education radically affordable, such that citizens can learn to think critically and engage with the issues of living in a modern, information-dense culture.

The capitalist function is at odds with this. Job training focused curricula teach practical skills to the detriment of timeless "enrichment" subjects. This damages the level of public discourse and is hostile to democracy (well-informed decisions on the part of voting public). It trains people to submit to a corporate environment, instead of enriching their inner life for decades to come.

This is why things like YC are excellent: they teach the best of capitalism, ie, leadership, risk-taking, meritocracy.

People should be free to determine how many dollars they want to attempt to accumulate relative to other goods. I completely agree that we need to get the price of Higher Ed. in the US under control. I also think that we need to be more up-front about what you can really get out of it: the "signalling function" of a degree (http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/handicap/honest_econom...) is fundamentally wrong-headed and doesn't do anyone much good: it leads middle-class kids who just want a decent credential to waste money on a college that is torn between vocational school and a transformational mission, and employers don't get much in the way of real information about a job applicant from it.

Sorry to ramble. I'm just very glad to see this conversation begin to open up; attitudes towards and uses of college degrees are incredibly broken, and it seems like a massive "re-factoring" of the whole system (concerns include: civic sophistication, quality of life enrichment, entrepreneurial, vocational-centric) into smaller, more focused parts is what is needed.

The serious acceptance of YC and other options like it is the first step along that path. Education is not one-size-fits-all, and we have been telling ourselves that about the "college" system for far too long.

I personally prefer the transformational model, but for many students that is neither desired nor likely to succeed.

Many students, in all sincerity, do not want to be transformed. They want the job ticket.

I don't think that everyone should be forced to accept a traditional liberal arts notion of university. I think instead that fewer people should go to university, and many universities really ought to be trade schools instead.

It is the signalling value of university education that has caused its dilution; much as the signalling of peacock feathers has rendered the male peacock quite useless.

Education has always been radically affordable, what European democracies have done is allowed students to have their children and grandchildren pay for their schooling by offloading the cost of that schooling onto the state debt.

"It trains people to submit to a corporate environment, instead of enriching their inner life for decades to come." Whilst I agree with you that schooling (not education) does this, please look at the percentage of people employed by small business in the US vs. 'European Democracies' I think you'll find that many more Europeans have corporate overlords than Americans.

"See, the sad thing about a guy like you is in 50 years you're gonna staht doin some thinkin on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certaintees in life. One, don't do that. And Two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin education you coulda got for a dollah fifty in late chahges at the public library "

That doesn't sound like any history of the modern university I've read. I don't doubt that some universities grew out of private tutoring from the wealthy, but the bulk of the western university tradition grew out of theology schools, whose students included quite a lot of the middle class.

I mean, Erasmus is one main starting point of the humanist tradition, and it would be difficult to characterize him as a wealthy kid hanging out in fashionable cities attending private seminars.

The wealthy were able to avoid having their kids attend such institutions precisely because they could hire private tutors! Either that, or they would attend only pro-forma, essentially buying a degree.

The theology schools were there first, but understandably they didn't teach much outside of ... theology. Kids with rich parents could do the Grand Tour of the continent and often visited famous thinkers where they lived. Around these sites universities often followed; eventually the idea of the university as an institution rather than happenstance evolved later.

(edit: I'm absolutely hand-waving a lot here, so I am prepared to be corrected)

I'm familiar with the Grand Tour, but your chronology seems backwards; the Grand Tour was a 17th-century creation, while the humanist university coalesced by the 15th/16th.

It wasn't limited to theology, though that was some of the original impetus; even the 13th-century universities commonly taught law, philosophy, and medicine. Through the 14th/15th/16th centuries most of the rest of the subjects were added: mathematics, astronomy, literature, etc. Galileo, for example, held a university chair in mathematics a century before the wealthy started sending their kids on the Grand Tour.

Indeed from everything I've read, university students were seen as stereotypically poor up until around the 18th century, living either at the university in vaguely monastery-type conditions with common dining and small quarters, or attempting to rent cheap rooms from townspeople, sometimes leading to tensions as locals felt the influx of poor students was ghettoizing the area (the area around the University of Paris was slightly notorious for centuries).

My understanding is that while students were poor in a sense -- little to no income - they tended to come from wealthy families. Otherwise they simply had to get work or starve to death, which precluded almost everyone from study.

The tradition of the poor rich kid has endured to this day.

Thanks for correcting me on the Grand Tour.

Bullshit. I've been right through from my bachelors to ph.d. without paying a single dime. Academia is full of smart kids on full rides.

It's also full of smart and not-so-smart kids on full fees. Either way, rich kids are always better positioned to study whatever they want.

While I would never have called YC the new grad school myself, I think you have a mistakenly utopian view of the origins of western higher education. The "traditional" idea of a liberal education you're describing is largely a creation of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Originally higher education was about training priests, lawyers, and doctors.

As learning became more prestigious, rich kids started going to universities as well. They were not there for vocational training. But they were the newcomers. The original model of university student was the one Westfall described in his excellent biography of Newton: "a plodding group, narrowly vocational in outlook, lower-class youths grimly intent on ecclesiastical preferment as the means to advancement."

If anyone wants to learn more about the origins of universities, I'd recommend Haskins's Rise of the Universities.

Fair points, but I think the essence of the parent's comment was whether higher education's mission is/should be to transform the student's ability to think, such that they can contribute truly new knowledge to society. and whether training for a job can/should be part of that.

I personally do believe in this higher goal of education.

I agree the utopian views are mistaken, but I think a purely dystopian one is mistaken as well. There were certainly plenty of kids just trying to get a job, but the universities also were the source of much of the intellectual development that led to early modern science/math. I recently read a biography of Copernicus, for example, which emphasized the impact on his thinking made by his four years studying at the University of Krakow. Other products of that era's universities included Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, and Leibniz.

"a plodding group, narrowly vocational in outlook, lower-class youths grimly intent on ecclesiastical preferment as the means to advancement."

Undergraduate education has broadened, but with all due respect to my peers, that sounds rather like an apt description of present-day grad students. (s/ecclesiastical/academic)

Off-topic, but how do you always know the best books for each historical topic? I've tried looking for books on specific topics but there seems to be no good way of finding the gems (amazon and other recommendation sites of its ilk have not yielded any successes for me).

Also, how do I know which books are most accurate? Looking at current political or biographical books, I see how slanted almost all books are because I have many other sources to go on and the relevant context to judge a book's accuracy. But all of this context is missing for historical books so I have no way of judging how biased or inaccurate they are.

What if I were learning history from the equivalent of a Glenn Beck?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say he probably knows what to recommend because he spends time reading. When you read something it's good to read up on the beliefs of the author on a variety of topics and get a sense of where their biases might trend. Normally this isn't very hard once you know what to look for.

The key is usually to identify the larger debate going on and make sure you know the different sides. For instance if you're going to read a book by Milton Friedman it's helpful to read up on the various schools of economics to see where he fits into that debate. I believe the term that applies here is erudition. You want that.

It's somewhat of an illusion. I only know the best books about subjects I understand fairly well, and I also try only to comment about subjects I understand.

Interesting question how to tell whether you're reading a biased account. It would take an essay to answer that. After you know some history, you can tell because biases causes their owners to make mistakes. But there's probably also internal evidence too. Never seeming surprised would be a bad sign, for example.

"After you know some history, you can tell because biases causes their owners to make mistakes."

The catch--

"History is a set of lies agreed upon" - Napoleon Bonaparte

The whole "after you know some history" demands a framework of a macrocosm to which one must depend entirely upon second-hand, at best, accounts. The glue that holds it all together is so tied to so many handles for bias both at the hands of the proxy observers as well as within the very bonding agents in the mind of the aggregator that the whole enterprise is rife with corruptive feedback potential that the anomalies that can be conclusively nailed as bona fide mistakes tend to be, for the most part, minimally useful for bias detection that tells you something you didn't already have a rather high certainty of.

The glue that holds it all together is so tied to so many handles for bias both at the hands of the proxy observers as well as within the very bonding agents in the mind of the aggregator that the whole enterprise is rife with corruptive feedback potential that the anomalies that can be conclusively nailed as bona fide mistakes tend to be, for the most part, minimally useful for bias detection that tells you something you didn't already have a rather high certainty of.

wat.

Seriously, it took me something like 4 minutes to understand what you wrote there. Maybe I'm just tired.

You're not tired.

No. I was tired. Hence my failure to properly punctuate and clearly enunciate.

My apologies, to all.

"a plodding group, narrowly vocational in outlook, lower-class youths grimly intent on ecclesiastical preferment as the means to advancement"

The irony is that today's anti-university movement is largely composed of people of this personality; just replace "ecclesiastical" with "technological", and you've captured the essence of the popular arguments for dropping out.

Mistaken views of the origin? Maybe. However the current economic state of the western society affords us to indulge in intellectual enrichment purely for the sake of it. In the pre 18th century era the difference between having and not having vocational training translated to the difference between starving and freezing to death or not. Now, even earning minimum wage or something close to it can afford us food and shelter, thus making the risk of going to school for "your passion" rather than "find work" much less life-threatening. Excluding a few exceptions, the economic gap has shrunken between the rich and poor. Given this comparative cushioned state, it is absolutely reasonable for universities to be expected to provide intellectual fulfillment and feed curiosities.

School failed spectacularly "at transforming my ability to think". In my experience, solving the problems you face when trying to create successful company does a much better job.

If YC is grad school, then Hacker News is on-line university.

The links to good articles are the curriculum.

The links to good references are the text books.

The debates and discussions are the study groups.

The "Ask HN" posts are the mentorships.

The projects we push each other to do are independent studies.

The community is my adult fraternity.

I've been here 4 years - I oughta try to get my diploma.

[Aside: Kinda ironic that your blog banner has a picture of my graduate school. The University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Business was in the 42 story Cathedral of Learning (the tall building on the right) where we took higher education quite literally.]

Schenley Park is an amazing city park. Pitt & CMU kids are lucky to have it.

I took that photo when I was visiting my grandfather at the Pitt medical center a few days before he died. This is actually a nice reminder that I was able to visit him that last time.

Have you started a company? I think that's your diploma.

If YC is a grad school, then doing a startup is a way to learn and graduate. Hanging around on HN should be viewed as entertainment. That's at least my experience (I have been on HN for the past 3.5+ years).

In the past grad students gave us : -> Relational databases -> Polynomial time deterministic algorithms for testing primality -> Shannon's masters thesis etc. etc.

I still don't believe that Google itself could have produced so excellent a product outside an environment that a top graduate school offers.

The concept of advancing the boundaries of the field is noble - the idea of making $$ out of it should hardly be the motivation IMO.

* The practicum is launching your first product.

* The Tuesday dinners are the weekly lectures.

* The coursework is Hacker News.

* Your fraternity brothers are the YC alums

* And unlike contributions to your university’s general fund – when you invest in Y Combinator you get a return.

Wow!

And $150K is your student loan (at least for the new enrollments)

If it's not a gift and you haven't earned it, it's a loan.

Convertible notes are a type of loan -- doesnt have anything to do with "earning it"

This is a pretty good characterization.

In CS at least, YC is very similar.

In both, most students don't pay to attend.

In both, most students get some funding -- a small amount of pocket change to buy ramen.

In both you'll work heads down in a way you've likely never done before, nor will do after.

In both your output, will hopefully, have you set for life.

In both you're surrounded by some of the best talent you'll likely see again doing the same thing you're doing.

Just about the only major difference is coursework (HN is really isn't equivalent). Of course, I've probably made some big assumptions and missed things having never gone through YC, but my short take.

I really enjoy your rational comments when it comes to this whole higher education vs. dropout ("uncollege") debate, which seems to have engulfed HN lately. Thanks for being a voice of reason.

From an outsider - I feel the parallels are closer to being punched into an elite Finals Club than a grad school.

The alumni network is smaller and likely more powerful.

Admittance into the club will carry more weight in future endeavors.

A very small percentage of hopefuls are accepted.

This isn't meant to be negative - I just feel it is a more apt comparison.

Perhaps a new business school...certainly not all of grad education.

I'll argue that the most important part of grad school is/was the people. And that is the element YC nailed for me.

I also had to teach myself a bunch of technical stuff to get xobni off the ground. Unlike grad courses this stuff was practical by definition.

For me YC and YC alums more closely fit the profile of an engineering grad program than a MBA program.

I think equally as important (but not more important) as the people you're studying with, are the people who are advising you. After all, I was always told to pick a grad school by the quality of the advisors you'd get to work with, not by the school's overall reputation. A really good grad school advisor teaches you not just the theory, but the "practical side" of theory - introducing you to their peers, explaining how grants get written and funded, walking you through paper writing and otherwise showing you how the sausage of research is actually made.

Of course, YC has plenty to offer in the advising department - that said, I think the distinction is worth noting. Why? Because I think there will be more quality advisors shaken out of the woodwork by YC-like programs - particularly in different cities where perfectly talented mentors have built their fortunes and families and have no desire to move from. Just like not everyone has to go to Harvard to become a great grad student, people won't have to go to YC to have great start-up mentoring. And that's a good thing; our economy needs more than one "startup grad school". I'm excited not just about YC, but about the trend YC has kicked off - the number of great people attracted to other YC-like programs across the country is going to skyrocket, sooner rather than later. This will help the economy grow overall - and help shield the tech industry when the bubble that is "expensive academic credentialing as job qualification" pops.

Are we talking about masters or PhD version of grad school? I could buy it for a masters-replacement. But an engineering PhD is supposed to be producing new basic technology, not learning existing technology, and ideally producing new technology that requires multi-year research to produce.

That's also possible to do in a more innovation/research-focused startup (biotech does this all the time), but it's not particularly common in tech startups afaik, mostly because "multi-year research 'til product" is not what investors want to hear.

Granted, the results are not always amazing in grad-school either, but quite a bit of basic research in PLs, systems, algorithms, etc. does come out of PhD theses. Could you really do something like Okasaki's "Purely Functional Data Structures" within the YC program?

Graham himself is actually doing an outside-of-academia version of PLs research with Arc. But most of the YC companies don't seem to be embarking on Arc-type projects.

apologies in advance for the self-post, but i wrote a somewhat-related article a few years ago about how the grad school research world can actually be similar to the start-up world, even though they seem like polar opposites at first glance: http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/research-and-startup.htm

thanks for sharing the link. nicely written article. apart from "formulating", "executing", and "selling" i would like to add two more steps in the beginning "survey" and "identify open problems". i would say in startup world also survey (competitive research) and "open problems" (novelty) are important.

"And unlike contributions to your university’s general fund – when you invest in Y Combinator you get a return"

Interesting concept. Why aren't there schools who teach a specific job, which don't take money, but instead take a percentage of salary from the students for some fixed time? That way they have incentive to be good teachers.

Because Stanford can charge a huge tuition and still get incredible endowments from alumn.

I wonder to what extent will programs like YC be funded by "donation" investments in the future? You only need a few Herokus to make enough successful founders for quite an "alumni" investment fund...and unlike my college alumni progam, few alumni would argue about "how their money is being spent". The only real problem I see in this is that it scales exponentially faster than PG is able to scale the number of companies he advises - but that might be solvable by, say, reducing the return of "donation" investments to make them more like pure "donations".

Just like regular colleges, you can focus on alumni while still taking money and guidance from other interested organizations (like Sequoia) for the benefit of the participants.

That's what a student loan is. It's just not for a specific job.

Very interesting. I'm curious as to how you would get into this grad school as a single founder?

It was easy for me to get into grad school (I'm there now), but without a co-founder, I feel as though it would be very difficult to get into YCombinator, and I'll most likely meet my future co-founder here at grad school.

aaahhhhh you guys are going collectively insane.

I have to agree with you regarding the way everything is going. Grad school is a very common for everyone to have so being part of something like YC or TS is just another avenue to expand your education in exchange for a piece of equity.

Yeah, well, the University of Maryland hates you too.

But, good article.

haha - it wasn't all bad. Just nothing, i repeat nothing like my experience with YC.

sidenote: went to penn state... lives in SF ... has Pitt's cathedral of learning as header??

in practicum, YC may be simliar to CS but in theory, i doubt it gets anywhere near the breadth or the depth of a CS grad school curriculum

Something, the new something unrelated.

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