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Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

He is hopeful, though, that as more VCs consider other parts of the country to seed their ventures, the problem may take care of itself.

"The University of Michigan graduates 8,000 engineers a year," he (Steve Blank) said. "Why don't we fund these companies cheaply in Ann Arbor?"

Why not indeed. But then some of those VCs might have to travel outside the Bay Area.

It's a self-perpetuating cycle - everyone's there because everyone's there, and I don't see that network effect going away any time soon. Everyone was on Windows because everyone else was on Windows. Everyone moves to iPod/iPhone, and the network effect brings everyone over to iPhone (yes, exaggerating a bit, but not much).

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8000 engineers per year? Assuming four years to graduate, doesn't that imply about 32k engineering students? If you add up all three UM campuses there are about 58k students. Engineers make up more than half of all students? I find that hard to believe for a non-engineering school (ala MIT or GT).

Exactly. I've read sources that claim there are only 11,000 computer science graduates nationally per year. Here's the source: http://www.peacepowerlove.com/archives/5187

If you include other sources of software professionals: math, applied math, physics, and engineering, you'll probably get closer to 50,000 per year. Add in non-college and college dropout and you'll get even more.

(The "8,000 from one school in one year" estimate is too high, though, yes.)

Great catch.

Here's their statistics on graduation rates by degree. It's a few years old but the latest isn't going to be all that different.

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/obpinfo/files/umaa_degrsbystudyfi...

Aerospace engineering - 102

Biomedical engineering - 48

Chemical engineering - 68

Civil Engineering - 50

Earth Systems Engineering - 1

Engineering - 9

Engineering Physics - 10

Financial Engineering - 16

Nuclear Engineering - 16

Now I'm going to guess none of the above degrees are the majors we are talking about for these startups, who are looking for software developers.

More relevant:

Computer Engineering - 84

Computer Science - 158

Electrical Engineering - 170

---

Total: 412

Maybe we should throw in all the Math, Physics, Linguistics and Music majors as well? Those are fields that are often sorted through for developers. It's a small number of each that goes into programming, but not insignificant.

In any case, this is Ann Arbor only. Can the claim of 8000 engineering graduates per year be substantiated for the entire system. Seems unlikely, but we need more data, and we'd definitely have to be including every field that has any possible connection, perhaps someone had a statistic that said there were 7002 STEM degrees granted system wide per year, and that turned into "around 8000" and then "8000"?

Ah, here is a year by year summary and one that puts all forms of engineering in one category:

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/obpinfo/files/umaa_degrssummary_1...

year - # eng degrees

2006 - 1034

2007 - 1065

2008 - 1150

2009 - 1198

2010 - 1254

That is undergraduate ONLY. There are also on that list comparable numbers of graduate degrees, so double the number for all degrees altogether: 1254 + 1035 = 2289 engineering degrees conferred in 2010. It's kind of amazing that they have the same number of grad students as undergrad, that means there is a near 1:1 ratio between grad students and undergrad, so each undergrad theoretically could be taught privately by a single grad student tutor if they wanted.

So to hit 8000 we need only 3 other U. Michigan campuses the same size as Ann Arbor.

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