The End of Stanford?

Since every comment seems to want to point to Stanford's rich history, diverse degrees and entrepreneurial excitement (I'm not doubting that Stanford has all of these things) Let me try to make something clear: The author isn't taking issue with any of those things. The author is taking issue with 20 year olds who have spent 50-100k on their education being asked to drop out for a .1% stake in a company so they can make their professor million. It is a very obvious conflict of interest, great school or not.

Sensationalist hogwash. Stanford continues to be strong as a research university, and not just in engineering. Consider that two of this year&#x27;s Nobel laureates were Stanford professors: one in medicine, one in chemistry. Think about the very strong history program, or the fine arts, or the (surprising) presence of the conservative Hoover Institution. In the years I spent as a student, I saw plenty of entrepreneurial excitement, but I also experienced excellence in areas far removed from the worlds of business, venture capital, and software.<p>Stanford is a diverse place. Just because a small number of students are dropping out to start companies doesn&#x27;t mean that the end of the university is nigh.

Well this is silly. Stanford graduation rates have been increasing over the past 10 years: (<a href="http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/2012" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ucomm.stanford.edu&#x2F;cds&#x2F;2012</a> - search for point B11). 1998-2003 were all in the 90-93% range. This last year had a graduation rate of 95%. This doesn&#x27;t support the opinion that students are dropping out &#x27;en masse.&#x27; As for &quot;professors having a financial stake in their student&#x27;s work&quot; – since when was this <i>not</i> the case? Professors have been dependent on grant money based on the work of their student researchers for decades; only previously, the students had no way of making money off of the work themselves.<p>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.<p>Edit: And I should have researched a little more: Stanford does have a policy regarding faculty investments: <a href="http://doresearch.stanford.edu/policies/research-policy-handbook/conflicts-commitment-and-interest/faculty-policy-conflict" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;doresearch.stanford.edu&#x2F;policies&#x2F;research-policy-hand...</a>. Points 3 &amp; 4 seem particularly applicably as a response:<p><pre><code> 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.</code></pre>

<p><pre><code> Shouldn&#x27;t it be a place to drift, to think, to read, to meet new people, and to work at whatever inspires you? </code></pre> This article does bring up a valid point, but it seems that the author is also blinded by his romantic notion of what a university should be.

As someone who graduated from Stanford pretty recently (2012), I can tell you that this is utterly ridiculous. Anecdotally, I would say there is a strong split between people who are insanely motivated to pursue a startup and people who think starting a company is a dumb trend motivated by naiveté.<p>Is Stanford a strong STEM school? Definitely. But if you take two seconds to actually look at the degrees that students end up earning (<a href="http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/2011.html#degrees" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ucomm.stanford.edu&#x2F;cds&#x2F;2011.html#degrees</a>), you get a picture of a much more well-balanced environment.

A dozen out of 17k and students and academic staff. Great story.<p>This interaction between industry and academia has long been one of Stanford&#x27;s greatest strengths. There is no Silicon Valley without Stanford, and that didn&#x27;t happen overnight or even lately.<p>Sure, CS is once again an absurdly popular major as it has been in the past. But with Stanford you don&#x27;t have to choose between Harvard &amp; MIT, you get both [&#x27;04 CS, color me biased].

This is hugely myopic: reality is far more Stanford students are going to be joining Microsoft and other established companies (we&#x27;re not even talking younger public companies like Facebook!) upon graduation than startups; those starting companies are going to be fewer.<p>Stanford <i>is</i> 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.<p>Hennessy isn&#x27;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).<p>I did not attend Stanford myself, but plenty of my friends have, and I&#x27;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).<p>However, it isn&#x27;t some kind of a incubator for a lilly-white privileged elite that it&#x27;s made out to be: it&#x27;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).<p>A long time ago, a friend who was heavily into hip-hop culture and lived in New York asked me if &quot;people were just being shot randomly&quot; 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 &quot;why are you leaving a known company to join some tiny one that may not be around&quot; then asked &quot;what took you so long?&quot;

There is also a follow-up post:<p><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/the-end-of-stanford-part-ii.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;online&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;elements&#x2F;2013&#x2F;04&#x2F;the-e...</a>

There is enough data to indicate that the primary function of elite universities is to signal that those they admit are motivated enough and smart enough to achieve success, for their definition of success. What they do post-admission in the university has little relevance to what they do in their professional lives. These latest trends at Stanford are simply a logical extension of this truth. In this scenario, Stanford is simply a richer version of Y Combinator.<p>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.<p>If other universities followed Stanford&#x27;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.

So, because of a few dropout students who start ephemeral startups with limited scope and no scalability that are destined to die out in 3 or 4 years until the next big thing comes along, Stanford is now no longer a school but a breeding ground for fresh business intellect?<p>Give me a break. Stanford&#x27;s graduation rates have been steadily rising to highs. Its research is still top-notch, and breakthroughs are found every day.<p>And Knuth... is that enough? Is it? Yes, it is. Sensationalism at its best...

Stanford are doing more than most to kill the traditional university (see Coursera and Udacity). It&#x27;s only natural that Stanford-the-institution should be trying to change the model so it can survive. It isn&#x27;t clear to me that giving students learning opportunities likes running a real company with real investors is a bad use of a university.

I am a current Stanford sophomore. I think that Mr. Thompson has a misguided view of what is currently happening at the school.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;ve heard of (read: Condoleeza Rice). Add in our 22 Nobel Prize winners that are currently teaching at the school, and you&#x27;ve got a pretty established research university.

The real point of going to school is not to earn a paper with ink on it. The purpose is to empower young individuals to do something that immensely benefits them, people around them and society in general. If Stanford students are able to do that before actually completing the degree course it is even better.

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines</a>

The article&#x27;s from April.

MIT is just the same - all their researchers and students are starting companies on the side while making use of MIT resources and networks.

While I agree this is a somewhat troubling trend, it is also ignoring the vast majority of students who go there and get an education as expected. It does seem that some conflict of interest rules should be put in place, but the hyperbole of the article weakens its case.

I rather enjoyed this post, but what a ridiculous premise. &quot;There&#x27;s a few great startups to come out of here over the last 100 years, the other thousands of students must feel the pressure to drop out!&quot; I mean, what?

For how many students is this picture of Stanford recognizable? (I have never been nearer Stanford than the SF airport, so the question isn&#x27;t entirely rhetorical.)

Kinda hand-wavy on what the actually problem is.

As a Berkeley grad, never was I happier to see a headline.<p>Up with the Blue and Gold, down with the red!

This kind of link-bait title and article seems above The New Yorker.

Stanford can be a very empowering place, no matter what you study.

Holy Hyperbole!

Is it not obvious to anyone else that Clinkle was secretly funded and supported by Stanford haters specifically to humiliate that university? There is no other explanation.<p>Clinkle&#x27;s not worth taking seriously in any context, and its existence does not establish anything, much less &quot;the end of Stanford&quot;.