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Nobel Prizes per undergraduate is an interesting measure. More than one in every 1000 Caltech undergrads wins a Nobel Prize, and that number rises substantially if one restricts just to science students, not engineering (which doesn't have a Nobel). This suggests that the admissions office there is doing something right.

I think it's actually Nobel Prizes per alumnus, i.e., it includes advanced degree-holders as well. (See http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/about/notable, which states that "Caltech has over 20,000 living alumni—of whom 17 are Nobel Prize-winning scientists", and goes on to list lots of notable Caltech Ph.D. alumni.) So the graduate admissions committees are apparently doing a good job, too (though clearly they screwed up in my case :-).

I've heard two different figures for Caltech. The 17 figure I read on Steve Hsu's blog; presumably he has the same source as you, although I assumed he was referring to undergrad only. That assumption seems to have been a mistake. The reason I made the assumption is that while I was a postdoc, one of the oncampus papers ran an article that set the number at 27, if I recall correctly, roughly equally split between undergrad and grad. In either case they're a long way ahead of other US Schools.

You can get a Nobel Prize science prizes for "physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine" but they often give them to 2 or 3 people so let's say 17 / (~8 per year over ~40 years) which gives you ~5%. That sounds great but I think most Nobel Ph.D. have 2 or 3 schools (if not more) in their background so it's really more like 2% which sounds about right for one of the top 25 science schools in the world.

Are you controlling for those not admitted that went to similar caliber schools, or have an example of how that statistic compares to those schools with a similar quality applicant pool?

You can show fairly quickly that the success of Caltech alumni in sciences, as measured by awards, is comparable only to the École Normale Supérieure (and possibly Phystech in Russia depending on how you count). Check out http://www.arwu.org/rank2008/ARWU2008_A(EN).htm

The column 'Alumni' compares the number of Nobel prizes or Fields Medals won by Alumni to the number won by Harvard (in percent). Caltech scores 52.8 on this, and ENS 53.4. But Caltech and ENS are by far the smallest of the universities on the top 100 list (unless I am mistaken). Both Caltech and ENS enroll about 200 undergraduates a year, with ENS enrolling only about 100 of those in science and engineering. Caltech has a population of another 1200 graduate students.

One thing to note about Caltech, ENS, and Phystech, they are extremely small, extremely selective, have no legacy admissions, limited or no affirmative action, and pay heavy attention to competitive exams, in the case of ENS and Phystech, administrating them.

Caltech admissions struck me as particularly clean. I think part of this is that they're very much into maths and sciences, fields in which SAT score do a great job of determining proficiency. You either know the answer or you don't. On top of that, they give back to their alumni in other ways; one couple that donated 200M to the university had their kid denied, but the university named a star system after them.

Even more successful would be Cambridge University. 83 Nobel Prize winners in total. (31 Nobels from Trinity College, Cambridge alone!) http://www.cam.ac.uk/univ/nobelprize.html

That said, Cambridge is a far bigger University than Caltech and others, but a large proportion of those degrees are awarded in non-science fields.

Ah, one issue from the SHJT list is that they weight more recent awards more heavily. Cambridge was a preeminent force in science and engineering in the earliest half of the century, but seems now to have diminished somewhat relative to others.

Here is a list of the Nobel Laureates per university straight from the source (based on affiliation at the time of the Nobel Prize announcement):

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/universities.html

Wikipedia has another list based on what universities claim themselves:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Laureates_by_univ...

So while Caltech is doing very well indeed, there are 15 universities with more affiliated awardees.

The first list is the list of the Nobel Laureates they OWN not they EDUCATED! Richer is the University more N.L it can hire and pay. :)

The Wiki is the one.

I know that Swarthmore, my alma mater, has had 5 Nobel laureates (if you count one Economics prize), and is comparably selective, and only slightly larger than Caltech. Note that it only has 20-30% as many science grads as Caltech [rough estimate].

College admissions officers do not, as far as I know, follow up on the careers of the people they accept and see how they did.

In Canada, one of the strongest selling points of universities is what fraction of their students got a job in a related field within X years of graduation -- so at least here, institutions do track this sort of data.

In addition, there's a lot of work done to validate admissions processes based on the success of students during their undergraduate years; universities have extensive "black books" which tell them how a student graduating from high school X compares to a student graduating from high school Y given the same nominal high school marks (here in Canada, admissions are done primarily based on high school marks -- we don't have any equivalent to SATs).

The fraction of people getting a job in a related field isn't a good measure except for trade schools. Often, the most successful and interesting people do something unrelated to their undergraduate degree. Or they do something other than a "job".

I've heard that U.S. universities have similar "black books." It's too bad they don't publish their data, because that would be an interesting way to compare the performance of high schools.

They're probably afraid that publishing their data would result in lawsuits.

Companies also have unofficial "black books." We know, for example, what schools to focus our recruiting efforts on based on the quality of the applicants we see. We do look for correlations between the new-grad applicants we make job offers to (we're rather picky :-) and the school they graduated from.

France too, at least my school. Just had an email from them: "Please let you know if your employement situation changes in any way." Seems like they want to get some good data on the effects of the crisis.

Australia too.

The YC brand has little weight to the customers of a startup, and without those a startup quickly dies.

It would be interesting to see numbers on that. Informally, I noticed that back when reddit was good, anyone who was asked had either heard about it because it was YC-funded, or heard about it from someone who heard about it that way. I'm not certain, but I would probably bet that the submitters of, say "Man sentenced to NINETY THREE days in jail for taking 6 seconds to sit down! Outrageous!" or "Warrant Issued For Man Paying Fine With Pennies" didn't find out about it the same way.

Reddit's a unique case because their initial user base (like News.YC's) consisted of other YC founders. And since they couldn't afford any form of promotion that cost money, news of the site spread mainly from those users.

I'm finding it difficult to square your assertion that Reddit is "unique" in this respect with the assertion that it's the web that's "making marketing and distribution free".

The only way that web marketing is "free" is if product awareness spreads between customers, or is pushed through the founders' personal contacts. Wouldn't this imply that we could expect this phenomenon - the initial user base being in some way close to the founders - to grow as the industry approaches the asymptotes you assert it is heading for?

I meant only that Reddit's connection to YC was unique.

Awareness of Reddit did spread between users.

And other followers of your essays, and people who got rejected from YC that first time. I checked out Reddit at first because I was curious what the folks who did get in were up to. And they happened to have built something cool, so I told a lot of my friends and family, and who knows who else they told.

I think it's a fairly good bet that Reddit did a lot better with their initial group of users being seeded from folks who'd heard of you or followed comp.lang.lisp, than if they tried to launch something among their UVa friends.

"College admissions officers do not, as far as I know, follow up on the careers of the people they accept and see how they did."

I checked for an article from the Harvard Crimson about the degree to which the admission office follows up on admitted students after they enroll, although I didn't find the link just now. You've received other replies mentioning various ways, with various degrees of formality, that admission offices can and do check their results. Now that many admission offices are making very fine distinctions among applicants as admission rates plummet below 10 percent, there will probably be growing interest in validating the criteria on which admission decisions are made.

MIT admission office McGreggor Crowley, in one of his admission travel sessions in the last year, said his office has done studies of which students perform best in upper division courses at MIT. Taking really hard classes in high school is a better predictor of upper-division success at MIT than having a spotless G.P.A., for example. He asked a large audience of high school students how many had done baby-sitting, and very few raised their hands. He said if that is one thing that kept you busy in high school, be sure to mention that on your MIT application.

i took undergrad research class and some grad level courses before applying

despite my Cs in english, pol sci, and other humanities courses, i got in ... to make it more dramatic, i also got graduate research assistantship :D

Access to funding and marketing continue to matter a lot for most startups. Since web products are so easy to change and refine in response to feedback the initial quality of a product doesn't matter too much. As long as you can get users to provide feedback and funding to stay alive while you refine the idea you have a much higher chance of success. I'd argue that YC provides both: more attention and better access to funding, particularly because YC's track record at picking winners. The better you get at picking winners the more important the YC brand becomes.

>but it's not true that the principal value of YC is the brand name

Yes, not to the customers of the app, but the interest the YC brand generates in "insider" circles, which helps bootstrap popularity I think you are underestimating.

> YC's principal value is the advice we (and the other YC startups) offer.

Yes but as before, the "brand impact" in the blogosphere (I feel dirty writing that) is still a huge thing. If that comes under the umbrella of advice, then that makes sense.

College admissions officers do not, as far as I know, follow up on the careers of the people they accept and see how they did.

I'm not sure that's true - in the UK at least, universities often issue press releases when one of their alumni does something notable (like becoming the Prime Minster of Thailand for example, which Oxford is crowing about at the moment).

Possibly because the UK is obsessed with league tables for universities, secondary schools and even primary schools. The University of York send me an annual survey to find out what I'm up to - I'm pretty sure they gather this data on all (willing) alumni, and where the data shows them in a good light they certainly make no secret of it at open days, etc.

Same for the UK university I attended. The survey is badly design, pretty much designed with the assumption that a graduate would be working for a big company. There's no way of reporting freelancer/self employed for example.

Yes most universities believe graduate -> graduate training programme, percentage thereof is measure of institutional success. Maybe that was true the last time the admissions officers were in the job market, but it hasn't been for 20-30 years.

And most universities make a big deal about any Nobel prizes.

And I've seen in Australia a follow-up 6-12 months later to see if you got a job / further study. But I've never seen a substantial follow-up of the average population of a uni.