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Comment by figassis | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how a university could package this, or package "experience" or. "building", etc. I went to college, did engineering and also did economics and did "entrepreneurship". The last 2 were useful not in a sense that they unlocked anything, but I was already starting a business by my second or third year, that I run to this day. I took the courses because I felt I needed them as I bootstrapped. Went on to build multiple startups since. Never went to YC though.

So something was already brewing in me much earlier, and idk what advice to give, honestly not sure how a university can inject this into students. But I think the useful part of the advice is to get universities to stop packaging "entrepreneurship" courses as the path to actual entrepreneurship.

What percentage of students in those classes actually go on to become founders? Willing to bet the numbers aren't encouraging.

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Right but what percentage of people doing any given class end up specialising in it?

It's not their job to "inject" it but universities are going to have to grapple with the notion that if they want to keep admitting students, then there aren't enough jobs in any market for the students on their courses.

So some truly functional support for self-employment, startups, small business working generally seems inevitable. If you're going to persuade students to step out of the job market for up to four years and take on vast debt to hand over then I think pastoral care includes providing the framework to teach them to fend for themselves when the jobs in the brochure don't turn up.

Concrete support, rather than "make yourself ready for something like YC".

(Beyond that I actually think prospectuses should be more closely regulated for what they can and cannot suggest is a likely employment outcome. Because at the moment, prospectuses are aimed at kids and are full of misleading content about how likely they are to get a job.)

> then there aren't enough jobs in any market for the students on their courses.

That has always been the case, because the purpose of universities is not feeding the market with workers or founders, it's feeding society with educated people. Which is incidentally an excellent basis for both founder and worker roles.

A University education is priced as though as it has near-term ROI. The government has subsidized it on the basis that it's opening an investment with strong near-term ROI to its citizens.

I don't think you can claim that this ROI is not its purpose.

If you only see life throuh a ROI lens…

I do think ROI is the best lens for trying to explain why something is priced at a substantial fraction of a million dollars.

For a very specific frame of time, and a very specific definition of "return".

Looking back at history, most, if not all marvels of the world have been built without a ROI lens.

Right but the tenor of it is different. In the 90s if you went more than a fortnight of job search after you graduated and didn’t get to being offered an interview, either you only had a third class degree or there was something very wrong with your CV.

These days every job has hundreds of applicants. In the AI era, thousands.

That is the aspirational purpose, not the functional purpose. Universities have long advertised job placement rates for the majors in their departments- I recall a lawsuit against a university I was going to by alumni with the allegation that the numbers were artificially padded to the point of false marketing (I don't recall the outcome, though).

Even if we were to accept the premise that universities exist to feed society with educated people, we should then question the value of the education students are getting, given the significant grade inflation over the last 20 or so years.

That’s not aspirational, that’s their very original purpose, which lands in their name.

"Universities have long advertised job placement rates for the majors in their departments" - they shouldn't have, this was actually never their purpose but it was easy to make that promise when jobs were easier for college graduates, so they used it to sell more seats. No one can give you a formula to get a job. You're competing with everyone for a scarce resource. That formula is self defeating. Let's enroll 10000 students and promise all of them that if they are on the top 500 they will be employed at one of the 100 available jobs?

And really, if universities wanted to feed the entrepreneurship engine, they should use their endowments to create funds within their programs, so innovative students could apply for, get some seed funding that is required to actually become a real business and generate a return on the fund.

Then you not only create actual founders, you grow your endowment and you actually evaluate the university on their fund's performance.

You democratize the YC model. I wonder why they haven't tried. Maybe bc they can't actually create founders?

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