The End of Stanford?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I have friends for whom UConn in-state tuition was more than attending Stanford, even when accounting for Cost of Living and frequent flights to and from California.
oh, well, don't let that stop you from chiming in!
I don't know anyone Stanford undergrad who ended up with even close to $100k in debt. Maybe my circles are limited, however.
No, the author never mentions or even implies that at all
There are conflicts of interest here; and questions of power dynamics. The leadership of a university has encouraged an endeavor in which students drop out in order to do something that will enrich the faculty.
ryguytilidie then made the connection to what some of the problems are with this conflict of interest. One of them relates to students dropping out but having paid for school.
Are they? Or are they choosing to drop out? Did somebody force Bill Gates out of Harvard in order to go found Microsoft?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2013/09/11/peter-thi...
That aside, I find your example a bit disingenuous. It's easy to say it's the right choice when you're looking at one of the relatively small number of people who have done this successfully. But using that as the example underemphasis the fact that the vast majority who take that route don't enjoy massive successes, and most are -- according to Atlantic's sources - less financially successful than their graduating counterparts:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the-myth...
MIT explicitly forbids an academic adviser from offering employment (directly or by a company they own) to any student while they are still enrolled. Otherwise you could have a situation of "if you accept this job, I'll let you graduate".
It's not hard to imagine that not having a policy like that would open Stanford up to lawsuits, if for instance a student feels compelled to work for someone in order to graduate. It might still happen, but if it is discovered I'm sure there are ways to address it.
I picked Bill Gates as a well known example of somebody who chose to drop out. I'm sure at least one unknown classmate of Gates also dropped out and didn't achieve much, but since I don't know their name, I didn't use them as an example.
1) we all got our undergraduate degrees. we dropped out of our graduate programs.
2) we were never encouraged by a faculty member to drop out. we were encouraged by the strength of the company and product. most all of us never talked with our university-affiliated investors about the company until after we dropped out, and after they invested (yes, basically all of them invested after we all dropped out. that's how we had a product to demo them with...)
It was annoying while I was in grad school, but it makes a ton of sense for preventing the appearance that a faculty member might abuse their authority to get a student to work on something that provides them with financial incentives.
This is standard conflict-of-interest mitigation stuff, I'd be amazed if Stanford didn't have it in place as well. I think at MIT they can't even offer you a job until you're no longer enrolled to prevent sub-par graduate research getting through because an adviser wants a student to work for them. (i.e. "If you accept this job, I'll sign off on your thesis.")
Stanford is a diverse place. Just because a small number of students are dropping out to start companies doesn't mean that the end of the university is nigh.
If there were allegations that professors were tying their instruction to investment--e.g. let me invest in your company or I will give you an F--I would agree that there are ethical issues. But I don't see any allegations of that.
That's not the point. The faculty-student relationship and university-student relationship is fraught with those kinds of ethical landmines. For example, I can tell you right now, if a professor is invested in student's company, he cannot be his professor ever again (i.e. he may be his lecturer, but he can never grade his or her projects, papers and exams).
This is all especially true in the context of investment and startups. I'm sure if you're a high-flying startup going towards a billion dollar exit everyone is happy and best-friends. But let me tell you, the nature of your relationship with your investors changes fundamentally when your business starts failing and there is a very real risk of people losing hundreds of thousands (or millions) of invested money.
>but unlike high school, the students in college are legal adults.
Doesn't matter. A doctor cannot write prescriptions for people he may know personally because of the obvious conflict of interest. Similarly a clinical therapist shouldn't be providing therapy for friends or family. It doesn't matter that all parties are responsible, upstanding adults.
Anyway, my point stands regardless. The fact that there may be no strict illegality in a school or faculty investing in student project, does not mean there are no ethical issues that have to be resolved. Furthermore, the faculty or school may be opening itself up to liability. Frequently these kinds of issues are not judged (in civil court at least) strictly on their legality but rather on the 'smell test'. I can imagine a scenario in which a student may sue the school alleging some negative repercussions in his school life given that the investment fell through (maybe sue the school for tuition fees he paid prior to being 'pressured' to quit school). The case may be merit-less, but the school could be punished for putting themselves in a position in which a conflict of interest exists. When a business blows-up there are a lot of hurt feelings and a lot of anger and bitterness.
School shouldn't be a library. I say startup like coursera just made university lab more interesting, solving more interesting problems, with a better salary. Not very different.
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2010/09/28/nrc-rankings/
No doubt computer science and startups are a big deal at Stanford, but that hardly means these other programs aren't there. No idea why this writer hasn't mentioned this.
Actually it isn't. The author raises some good points.
I do think that it would be good to establish and maintain a set of ethics for professors who have a financial stake in companies, but it seems like this piece was more of a ranting projection built for page views than a thoughtful criticism on the state of the university.
Edit: And I should have researched a little more: Stanford does have a policy regarding faculty investments: http://doresearch.stanford.edu/policies/research-policy-hand.... Points 3 & 4 seem particularly applicably as a response:
3. Faculty must foster an atmosphere of academic freedom by
promoting the open and timely exchange of results of
scholarly activities, and ensuring that their advising of
students (defined for this policy to include postdoctoral
scholars and other trainees) and their supervision of staff
are independent of personal financial interests. Faculty
should inform students and colleagues about outside
obligations that might influence the free exchange of
scholarly information between them and the faculty member.
4. Faculty may not use University resources or personnel,
including facilities, staff, students or other trainees,
equipment, or confidential information, except in a purely
incidental way, as part of their outside consulting or
business activities or for any other purposes that are
unrelated to the education, research, scholarship, and public
service missions of the University.You're missing the point of the question. The real question is, is stanford legitimately a non-profit institution? That's not a 'silly' question, and it has material implications.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act
Before the Bayh–Dole Act, federal research funding contracts and grants obligated inventors (where ever they worked) to assign inventions they made using federal funding to the federal government.[3] Bayh-Dole permits a university, small business, or non-profit institution to elect to pursue ownership of an invention in preference to the government.[4]
Stanford, further, is a private institution. See, for example, their investment company: http://www.smc.stanford.edu/ which is part of the university and is overseen by the Board.
They certainly don't qualify (nor do public universities like UC) as non-profits; they don't reinvest all their earnings into their operating budget. Investors in Stanford receive a return on the growth of the endowment.
https://ogc.stanford.edu/stanford-legal-facts#q1
A 501(c) organization, also known colloquially as a... "nonprofit", is an American tax-exempt nonprofit organization.
However, reality demonstrates that Universities are most definitely for profit. This is embedded in their operating principles. Have you worked with the Office of Technology Licensing?
This includes that you would call "nonprofit" according to IRS, but this is actually an issue that has been debated since Bayh Dole by people who understand the subtlety of what I'm talking about. In short, the very definition of nonprofit itself is inadequate the span the nature of corporations which are under 501c3.
They certainly don't return profit to investors, which is what 501c3 and several related-but-different "nonprofit" designations refer to.
I'm not sure in what other sense you could be meaning that they are "for profit".
> Have you worked with the Office of Technology Licensing?
Certainly, Universities have parts of their operations devoted to generating revenue; all nonprofits necessarily do, since if they don't generate revenue that meets expenses, they can't continue to operate. Revenue is not the same thing as profits.
> people who understand the subtlety of what I'm talking about
If you have a coherent idea, perhaps you can explain it rather than making implications that anyone who hasn't read your mind is intellectually defective.
> In short, the very definition of nonprofit itself is inadequate the span the nature of corporations which are under 501c3
Since the relevant definition of nonprofit comes from 501c3, it is, necessarily, sufficient to span the entities which fall under 501c3, since anything it doesn't span doesn't, ipso facto, fall under 501c3.
This activity has caused many to question the tax-exempt status of universities. The purpose of tax exemption for universities is to promote education, not prevent universities in acting as for-profit institutions.
Some examples: the (complex and unique) example of Cooper Union.
Also: http://www.irs.gov/uac/Newsroom/IRS-Releases-Final-Report-on...
The audits identified some significant compliance issues at the colleges and universities examined,” said Lois Lerner, Director, Exempt Organizations division. “Because these issues may well be present elsewhere across the tax-exempt sector, all exempt organizations need to be aware of the importance of accurately reporting unrelated business income and providing appropriate executive compensation.”
Note the discussion of unrelated business income.
There is an active lawsuit against Princeton on similar grounds: http://www.nj.com/mercer/index.ssf/2013/06/lawsuit_challengi...
from article: "The school’s policy of sharing patent royalties with faculty could cost the university an additional $20 to 30 million in taxes a year."
Please, do not ever tell somebody they are intellectually defective; it weakens your argument. Further, as I've demonstrated everything to support my case, in showing that there are 501c3 unviersity organizations which have been cited by the IRS for having violating the terms of that.
Internal grants are not a redistribution of profits, they are an internal budget allocation. The funds don't become personal funds.
> This activity has caused many to question the tax-exempt status of universities.
People question lots of things on bases which are not legitimate.
> The purpose of tax exemption for universities is to promote education, not prevent universities in acting as for-profit institutions.
Its actually both, as is obvious from the tax code. Tax exemption under 501c3 requires both not being operated for profit and operating a specific form or function of entity (educational, in the case relevant to universities.)
> Note the discussion of unrelated business income.
Unrelated business income is a separate requirement of tax-exemption from not operating for profit; income from unrelated (to the tax-exempt purpose) business income is taxable to protect for-profit business from not-for-profit institutions. The fact that the IRS found some issues with some colleges and universities regarding proper reporting of unrelated business income does not mean those colleges and universities (much less universities in general) are operated for profit.
> There is an active lawsuit against Princeton on similar grounds
The existence of an active lawsuit isn't proof of anything except the existence of someone with a sufficient interest in the legal effects of the finding that the lawsuit seeks.
> Please, do not ever tell somebody they are intellectually defective
I criticized your rhetoric, not your intellect.
Shouldn't it be a place to drift, to think, to read, to meet new people,
and to work at whatever inspires you?
"Shouldn't it be a place to drift, to think, to read, to meet new people, and to work at whatever inspires you?"
Should it be? Perhaps it's time we reevaluated what college is supposed to be about. Given the skyrocketing costs of a college education, not to mention the opportunity costs of the 4 years spent there, maybe we need to think of the "investment" in a college education as precisely that: something to be taken quite seriously.
I wouldn't want my child to debt-finance a startup, to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars, just so he could "drift, think, read" and so forth. So why is it ok that he does so for college?
College is the last great chance to "drift" in life before one has to grow up and get serious. Sure. But it's also the most pressure-free environment in which to build the foundation for the rest of one's life. It's a huge investment, literally and figuratively, to waste aimlessly. Use college wisely. Not every second has to be a grind, but on the other hand, I don't think over-grinding is the issue for most of our country's college students. Have some fun in college, yes. Expose yourself to new ideas and cool things. Great. But don't treat the experience as a four-year vacation from the real world.
I don't mean to come across as a heartless 'tiger parent' in this comment. But these romantic notions of college strike me as increasingly antiquated. They're luxurious fantasies that many of us can't afford to nurse.
The social implications of college seem to get lost in the debate on HN, and really everywhere to some extent. We don't send our kids to college simply for their own good, we do it also for the good of society, which is why, in the past, people saw fit for society to cover most of the cost.
> But these romantic notions of college strike me as increasingly antiquated. They're luxurious fantasies that many of us can't afford to nurse.
Look at the hyper conformity of the average consumer.
I'd pay anything for health (insurance co exec and hospital exec smile)
I'd pay anything for my kids to get a good job, and rich peoples kids used to get great jobs, and also used to get an education, therefore education must be required for great jobs, so I'll pay anything for my kids vocational educational training (university execs rub hands together in glee at idea of multigenerational 10% annual tuition increases)
I'd pay anything to live in a nice safe location (sellers and commissioned real estate agents and commissioned mortgage brokers/bankers jump up and down with excitement at a new sucker)
There are a couple things in common. Suckers who see the expenditure as a universal, unarguable good, and entrenched players doing the ogliopoly thing by purchasing .gov regulations to prevent a free / competitive market.
Any time you hear some well trained little consumer drone claim they would pay anything for some trite object, we just hear an idiot, but a businessman hears a cash register bell... Pay anything you said? Well... that can certainly be arranged...
Education for your kids, health insurance to finance treatment for deadly illness, and personal safety are hardly "trite objects". If a person would not spend highly on these things, what would he be willing to spend on as a higher priority?
Granted these are typically less expensive than the services you mention, but they're certainly not less important. Rather, they're sold in functioning, normal markets of private firms.
Finally another key to the puzzle is its perception that sells not the product. If you think your insurance company will stand by you to help you thru an illness, they would never try to screw you and your heirs as much as possible, well, I've got a bridge to sell you. "The system" is crooked enough that if someone is selling you safety you can pretty much assume they're just screwing you over; kind of like any argument in politics involving "its for the children".
When was that?
I'm immensely grateful for my time at University to explore not just a variety of topics, but to explore myself and my interests.
But look at the wealth of the median college student. College is no longer a privilege of the 1%, but a requirement for the masses.
That fantasy is still free and luxurious and new and cool, just you need an internet connection (which you need anyway) instead of attending school. If you're the type that doesn't want to learn, going to school isn't going to help much, and if you're the type that wants to learn, you don't need the school (to learn) if you have the internet.
The only remaining purpose of school for most, is social signalling and some advanced (and some not so advanced) vocational training, and a few nuts like myself who still think education itself is worthwhile, as opposed to mere vocational training.
Since college I have made my living entirely in the outdoor and computer industries. It's been a fun and productive career.
I think that's what the author meant by drifting--not getting drunk all the time, but exploring other interests.
If I didn't drift, I'd have a much harder life today: writing and geology are industries that have become less lucrative since college. My current career--building and operating websites--did not even exist when I matriculated!
Stanford is a world class research institution. If it accelerates people creating companies by a few years, what's so bad about that?
Even if 100 people a year dropped out of school to create startups, Stanford would still have a much higher graduation rate than most US universities. Especially ones with nationally ranked football teams. This is a false problem.
The only downside I see in the article is perhaps the professors and administration are taking their eye off the ball on other topics while they act like VCs.
Now, the romantic ideal of these old-time universities is the image of the rich sons attending dad's school so he can get set in with the next generation of Good Old Boys. Boy, what a shame we've lost that.
Is Stanford a strong STEM school? Definitely. But if you take two seconds to actually look at the degrees that students end up earning (http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/2011.html#degrees), you get a picture of a much more well-balanced environment.
STEM = 46%
Politics& Beuracracy = 37%
Arts = 14%
This seems intuitively correct, but YMMV.
Biological / Life Sciences (CIP 26) 7.1 Computer and information sciences (CIP 11) 5 Engineering (CIP 14) 15.1 Engineering technologies (CIP 15) 3.7 Mathematics and statistics(CIP 27) 3.3 Physical sciences (CIP 40) 4.7 STEM 38.9
Visual and performing arts (CIP 50) 2.6 History (CIP 54) 3.2 Liberal arts/general studies (CIP 24) 0.1 English (CIP 23) 3.6 Foreign languages and literatures (CIP 16) 3 Philosophy, religion, theology (CIP 38) 1.7 Arts 14.2
+Pro-rata on interdisciplinary (16%)
This interaction between industry and academia has long been one of Stanford's greatest strengths. There is no Silicon Valley without Stanford, and that didn't happen overnight or even lately.
Sure, CS is once again an absurdly popular major as it has been in the past. But with Stanford you don't have to choose between Harvard & MIT, you get both ['04 CS, color me biased].
How is this relevant at all? The fact that some students are in a situation where they are pressured to drop out for the economic gain of their professors is clearly a problem. Just because it is happening to a small number of students doesn't make it okay...?
Give me a break. Taking a break from Stanford undergrad for a few years with a few awesome peers to run a startup happens a few times a year, if not more lately. Some non-trivial portion of the CS majors join to start a company. Timing often dictates market opportunity. This seems like an amazing one - faculty want to join, you're backed by the president Stanford university.
An absolutely fantastic opportunity that the students owe to their luck of having gotten into Stanford.
Stanford is a non-profit institution, their mission is education, not generating a profit for their share holders. Venture investments as an approach to maintaining their endowment does not, in any way, conflict with this -- all universities maintain investment portfolios.
Hennessy isn't exactly a new comer to technology: when I was looking at errata for my Computer Architecture textbook (_the_ Computer Architecture textbook) I found it more surprising for me to find that one of its authors (Hennessy) was the president of Stanford (given that Patterson is at Berkeley and that STEM folks rarely took leadership positions at universities).
I did not attend Stanford myself, but plenty of my friends have, and I've been on campus many times. Like any institution, I am sure it has many valid criticisms -- the idea the educational system is purely meritocratic and available to anyone intelligent and motivated, for example, is still a myth (in several senses of the word -- it representations genuine aspiration, but does not reflect reality).
However, it isn't some kind of a incubator for a lilly-white privileged elite that it's made out to be: it's incredibly diverse and beyond being a top-tier research university, it also has a great humanities program including a core curriculum. Indeed, the endowment is why students who do not come from wealthy backgrounds have been able to afford it (the same is also true for many other elite universities).
A long time ago, a friend who was heavily into hip-hop culture and lived in New York asked me if "people were just being shot randomly" in California, as the rap music seems to suggest. The idea that everyone in Silicon Valley is a startup founder is equally as silly: I remember the weekend after I left Yahoo (by then perceived to be in decline) to join a startup in January of 2008 (the nexus of web 2.0 boom), more people asked "why are you leaving a known company to join some tiny one that may not be around" then asked "what took you so long?"
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/the-e...
What this means is that in the rush to make more money and get more startups going, perhaps more meaningful things will be de-emphasized. The bright student on entering the school gets the unspoken message that founding a tech startup is more prized than say building the groundwork for bio research, or questioning and trying to change society, or perhaps investigating dark matter.
If other universities followed Stanford's lead, we could end up with a world where many individuals will individually be monetarily richer, but one in which we could all collectively end up less rich in knowledge and meaning.
Give me a break. Stanford's graduation rates have been steadily rising to highs. Its research is still top-notch, and breakthroughs are found every day.
And Knuth... is that enough? Is it? Yes, it is. Sensationalism at its best...
If you want credit you still have to pay like a class. However, for a number of them at least the managers had salaries that met or exceeded their course cost, and some everyone was paid.
Michigan Tech feeds to the biotech and automotive industries particularly in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin given the location, and a lot of the enterprises have done some cool things with those fields, as well as some defense work.
But the article oversteps in saying this is the main thing that's going on at Stanford. It's a big place. My connection with Stanford is working with solar physicists there who developed a series of space instruments to observe the Sun -- a big effort, lots of people, hardware, and computers, but nothing commercial about it.
Stanford definitely puts a lot of emphasis on engineering and entrepreneurship but this has been the case since Frederick Terman encouraged Hewlett and Packard to create Hewlett-Packard. We've got plenty of pure researchers, especially in Artificial Intelligence and in self-driving cars. We also have Don Knuth. If you ever want to see pure academic research in CS, flip through TAOCP for a little.
We also have plenty humanities researchers and writers. The Hoover Institute at Stanford is a leading think tank about government and has a handful of researchers you've heard of (read: Condoleeza Rice). Add in our 22 Nobel Prize winners that are currently teaching at the school, and you've got a pretty established research university.
Up with the Blue and Gold, down with the red!
Clinkle's not worth taking seriously in any context, and its existence does not establish anything, much less "the end of Stanford".
The startup mockumentary idea could make someone a lot of money. If "virtual wallet attempt #21441" isn't pivoted into a mockumentary, they are missing a golden financial opportunity. I'm not sure what would be a better movie topic, perhaps kitty litter delivery over the internet? This does have certain implications for the movie idea because buying the rights to one of the numerous failed virtual wallet dotcoms might be the simplest way to get the intellectual property for the movie.
I'm not kidding about this. A hoax / mockumentary combo in startup-ville could be a serious moneymaker of a movie. I could see it pitched as a light summer comedy. Someone's going to do this sooner or later... best hurry up.