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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

Quite a lot of people drop out of Oxford because it's an intense high-pressure environment. It may not have been out of choice, even if he's portraying it that way

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Only 1.3 percent of students drop out of Oxford, versus 7.4 percent for the UK.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/about/facts-and-figures/full-version-fa...

Not at all like America where only 1/3 graduate.

In elite schools [edit: that are as elite as] Oxford, the drop out rate would be close to Oxford's. The US numbers are pretty skewed by the massive drop out rate in 2-year community colleges, which both admit huge numbers of people and have very high dropout rates. Also, a huge percentage of dropouts are in the first year, when people are deciding that college may not work for them or be the right fit.

> In elite schools like Oxford, the drop out rate would be close to Oxford's

Typo?

Lots of US 4 year colleges have terrible graduation rates. It’s not just community colleges.

The UK also doesn’t have a culture of “drop out and start your own company.”

Harvard has 98% and that would be the high bar. 93-95 for MIT.

Fixed the typo, if by that you were referring to the construction "elite schools like Oxford" to mean "elite schools that are as elite as Oxford".

And yes, it's not just community colleges. But those are the worst part.

I don't think that's a typo. Instead, I think when they write "like", they mean "similar to" (not "such as").

Actually, the US numbers are already filtered to 4-year institutions.

"The overall 6-year graduation rate for first-time, full-time undergraduate students who began seeking a bachelor’s degree at 4-year degree-granting institutions in fall 2012 was 62 percent. That is, by 2018 some 62 percent of students had completed a bachelor’s degree at the same institution where they started in 2012."

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40

(There is some amount of skew based on this definition for students who transferred to a different institution and then completed on time, but it's hard to find numbers on students who transferred from one four-year institution to another, as opposed to all transfers who predominantly come from 2-year community colleges.)

There are a lot of crappy 4 year institutions out there, the point still stands that the graduation rate at Oxford-comparable schools is very high.

So that's 1.3% out of "more than 24,000 students at Oxford", i.e. ~310 students per whatever the counting period of that 24k number is. That's not a low number, of a population that's already heavily selected. Plenty of resourceful folks could find themselves in this group.

I'm deeply confused at your response. 310 is still 1.3%, which is both a low number and percentage. Especially when compared with the larger 7.8% of other UK universities as OP stated.

Most UK universities are heavily selected. Indeed, Oxbridge moreso and as such you'd expect the dropout to be lower which it is. Hence OPs response.

It's a low number and percentage in a relative sense. It's a non-insignificant number in an absolute sense.

This whole subthread was in context of the question of how often people drop out from Oxford and for what reasons. My point is that it's 310 people every year or few years (depending on how they count that 24000 number) - it's a number big enough to admit a variety of reasons and characters.

This comment managed to blow my mind. Are we really trying to say the cofounder of DEEPMIND is too stupid / incompetent to have graduated from Oxford and came up with a charity as a front for it?

He was a childhood friend of Demis. The cofounder title seems to be less profound here.

Ok so the new theory is that there is nepotism present at DeepMind thanks to Demis Hassabis.

That’s not at all what I suggested. It seems like you just want an argument.

Let me explain again slower: you implied that him being cofounder conferred some level of competence to him. I’m saying that he’s not really a cofounder in the traditional sense of the word, and so maybe that title doesn’t carry as much weight here.

Not really about being stupid or incompetent, but about managing workload, subjects, pressure.

A lot of people don't deal very well with this, especially young students.

He was not the cofounder of Deepmind while he was a student. That happened afterwards.

That's absolutely possible, I don't know why people think entrepreneurship requires a high level of intellect, it doesn't really.

Not to say this guy is stupid, I just don't see why you'd associate founding a company with intellect?

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