Rather than have a students do a co-op, wouldn't it make more sense to give students the opportunity to spend 6 months building their own company while at a university? Students would probably learn more than they would at most internships / co-ops and the long term benefits to the students would be greater. How would you start such a program?
The problem with that is that at YC there is a huge incentive to succeed. Only people which are very passionate about their idea/entrepreneurship are accepted. Furthermore, when you're out of university, a startup is your only hope, and if you fail you have <i>failed</i>, whereas in a class people will be less motivated to succeed, because this is just a single class, and you have your schooling to fall back on.<p>Finally, the biggest value of YC is the incredible quality of mentors and peers. Naturally, both of those would suffer. Really, this is less a YC class and more a simple startup class, which many universities are doing, but to much less success than YC