Are universities failing entrepreneurs? | Hacker News Reader

Are universities failing entrepreneurs?

kernelmag.com

27 pointsabarrera11 comments

I was under the impression that universities were institutions that distributed knowledge, not entrepreneurial skill factories.

FYI, many schools have had entrepreneurial programs for years (maybe even decades in some cases.) These aren't new, maybe more popular today, but certainly not new.

Universities are failing the progression of thought, period. Few are actually encouraging people to share ideas freely; many are "open-minded" as long as your ideas are leftist and not too offensive.

I'm a high school senior and many colleges I've looked at and applied to have stricter regulations on speech than high schools and super-limiting workplaces.

Papers are being assigned with minimum length requirements, experiments involving drugs are being squashed, and political correctness is often being held higher than freedom, honesty, and the exchange of ideas.

So what I mean by all this is that, yes, to look at this progression towards bullshit and think "Maybe I'll learn to run a business there" is nonsense. I think it's good that entrepreneurs are spending less and less time with "higher" education. Get the fuck out and start actually building things.

I attended the university with "the worst free-speech policies in America", and we had an active Objectivist Society and a Republican Club that spent its time trolling the rest of the (very left-wing) campus. They spoke quite freely.

The issues tend more towards the administration wanting to prevent a riot and passing speech restrictions than towards "Free Gaza" hipster-activists actually managing to really suppress speech through heckling.

If you think that a minimum-length requirement on a paper is an odious suppression of your rights, I advise you to:

A) Right a truly concise paper and pass it in with a note justifying its brevity on grounds of said concision. Warning: only the best writers can really do this.

B) "Get the fuck out and start actually building things." You might make a good sum of money that way, but you won't ever learn or think much. Just another thoughtless capitalist.

I am not always sure it is up to the university to help entrepreneurs in a formal way.

However I was impressed when our neighbors to the South (Univ of Mich) created a Masters in Entrepreneurship.

http://entrepreneurship.umich.edu/

Details are scarce but judging by Steve Blank's enthusiasm it hews closer to Lean Startup than a traditional MBA.

Yet when I posted it in a local forum the consensus was the money for the degree would be better spent for startup capital.

Universities are not going to 'make' entrepreneurs. That trigger usually happens a lot earlier in life. Take for example, the "Montessori Mafia" that includes people like Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Jeff Bezos, Will Wright, Jimmy Wales, Julia Child, and Sean “P.Diddy” Combs. The common thread among them is that they all were educated in a Montessori environment (http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the-montessori-...). At a very early age, they were empowered with and nurtured to exercise their minds in ways that coincidentally make for successful entrepreneurs. I'm not saying Montessori is necessarily the only way to do this, but I think if you spoke to 10 entrepreneurs, a majority would point to experiences in their youth as having had an impact on their path.

Someone else that speaks to this is Sir Ken Robinson (Changing the Education Paradigms): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

Universities, by nature, have very rigid course structure that must be followed. Add other responsibilities like administrative formalities and deadline based work and universities become the last place an entrepreneur would be found. For example, if you watch the show Numb3rs, one of the issues that the crime-solving math proff has with the university is his lack of presence to teach and guide students. That is, what I believe, the problem with universities. Perhaps the online universities will resolve these issues as there will be faster processes and online paperwork that could be done at leisure. ( I ha e not read the article yet)

You know what else has administrative formalities and rigid deadlines? Running a business. Suggesting an entrepreneur avoids these things is rather silly.

IMHO the larger problem with universities is (in CS, at least) their subject matter largely provides theory and foundations without enough practical exercise.

I realize it's a place of higher learning but graduating students who have never written larger applications than a few hundred lines of code is a disservice to the students who will have trouble adapting to coding in the real world.

Where did you attend University? Most other computer science majors I've met encountered at least two classes during the course of their degree which involved a semester-long software project that was iterated according to new concepts introduced in the course.

Second this. A "project course" is a required part of the CS curriculum where I attended college, and that's almost always not the only project course you'll take. I did one every quarter for three years.

I wasn't talking about student entrepreneurs. I was talking about professors who want to use their time to build businesses while still teaching.

Those who can do, those who can't, teach. Why would you expect to find anyone who could teach entrepreneurial skills in a college? With the exception of a few institutions that hire actual entrepreneurs (eg, Steve Blank) most professors simply don't have the skills or experience.

Check the resumes of the professors at your local (or favorite) institutions. How many of them (if any) have experience as a founder, let alone just operational experience in a startup?

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