Olin College Produces Founders at Five Times the Rate of Stanford(blog.ledwards.com) |
Olin College Produces Founders at Five Times the Rate of Stanford(blog.ledwards.com) |
Also, this was written by an Olin alumnus.
It is also strange to me this Olin School is trying to beat Stanford with a single statistics. What are they trying to do here? To prove they are better than Stanford? Or to let kids dropping out of Stanford and apply to them? Or to make a fame by taking on a particularly prestigious school?
This is what I know. In the tech startup world, nobody cares where you graduated. Whether it is Olin or Stan, it doesn't matter.
You seem to be projecting quite a bit.
>Olin College, a small engineering school in Needham, MA, which graduates around 75 students per year, turns out an alumni population where 2.77% of alumni found a successfully venture-backed startup, more than five times the rate of Stanford (0.51%), MIT (0.75%), Harvard (0.28%),
Wow, who would have guessed.
https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/03/29/why-selection-bias-is-t...
As an alum, I specifically went to Olin because I thought it would best help me become a successful entrepreneur. Many people do.
So my priors are that Olin is likely to do this at a higher rate (since Stanford / MIT etc. have entire swathes of the school not interested in entrepreneurship at all); this evidence makes that seem overwhelmingly likely now.
Consider evaluating all the departments of a school and finding out that one of the smallest turns out the highest percentage of high-energy physicists. Selection bias? Nope, just the high-energy physics department.
From the link:
>In other words, what we might have perceived as a difference in education quality was really the product of systematic differences in how the considered populations were put together. The groups we considered had a hidden non-random distribution. This is selection bias.
As you just stated, entrepreneur-y students self-select into Olin. The fact the school produces entrepreneurs doesn't have anything to do with the teachers, the curriculum, or the chemicals Olin puts in the drinking water. It's the non-random distribution of students.
"I specifically went to Olin because I thought it would best help me become a successful entrepreneur"
choose one
Is it that the type of people who would be attracted to founding a startup are more likely to apply/be accepted to Olin than Stanford? That seems to confirm the original article's thesis rather than invalidate it, in my eyes, so I don't expect that's what you're thinking..
But it doesn't scale. If you made Olin accept ten times as many students, then its numbers would regress to the mean.
Give me the stats and I'll show you why a seemingly random school is the epicenter of modern opioid addiction.
Here's her thoughts on why it's not just sample size: https://twitter.com/ellenchisa/status/905448602142572545
If it were purely size plus noise there would be a few other weird schools on the list.
The bigger question isn't funding, it's how they'll do. No unicorns yet, let alone massive exits. Win the market share for that, and I'll really be impressed.
We first met when he interviewed me as part of Olin's Candidate's Weekend. I told him how impactful the book had been. An hour later, he found me again and gave me a signed physical copy.
When I was in grad school, I fantasized about finishing my PhD and teaching there.
But frankly, I knew they wouldn't take me :-(
1. First and foremost, go Olin College! It sounds like a really special place where liberal arts and engineering are valued. I wish more colleges followed this model.
2. It's not very surprising and likely a statistical quirk that their per capita founding rate is so high. After reading this piece on why the highest and lowest cancer rates by county in the US are in rural counties, I am seeing this statistical phenomenon everywhere: https://books.google.com/books?id=JRueDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA14&lpg=P...
That is random noise. A small population is impacted far more by noise.

So its a tiny college with an emphasis on starting a company? At Stanford your numbers are being diluted by colleges whose student body don't tend to start a company (e.g. humanities, pre-med).
Edit: Actual Wikipedia entry = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insensitivity_to_sample_size
First, because Olin is ludicrously selective, and second, because Olin only offers founding-friendly majors. I don't think a pre-med intending to become a surgeon should really be faulted for "failing" to start a company, but that's effectively what the article does.
But statistics tells us that small samples are more prone to extreme outcomes.
This seems to be a problem in all scientific fields, a quick google search came up with this article from Nature: https://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/full/nrn3475.html?...
But that said, I've got a kid looking at colleges and I'm gonna suggest he look at Olin.
Whatever they're doing over there, I hope they keep it up.
Olin outcomes for the class of 2017 http://www.olin.edu/blog/career-and-graduate-stories/post/co...
Olin is trying to reinvent engineering education for this century. They did locate at the edge of Babson college because they think that having business knowledge is important. The student can take classes at Wellesley and they think that is important also. aka Liberal Arts.
The are working to export their engineering education successes. I can't find a link that explains that right now but they want to change engineering education widely.
They are selective. They require an onsite interview and observed team work after you have been academically qualified. They want students with grit, that know have to reflect, and students that know success comes via failure. You can read about the incoming class of 2021 here: http://www.olin.edu/blog/olin-admission/post/welcome-class-2...
Full disclosure: My youngest daughter is a first year 2021 student. She is not a start up kind of person but she iterates toward success via failure and has 4 years of FLL experience, 6 years of FRC experience and 2 years of FTC. She has assembled a 3D printer, written a state law that funds after school STEM (it passed and was funded) and worked with underserved middle schools on after school STEM enrichment for a year between HS and College (gap year). Yes I am proud.
FLL - First Lego League FTC - First Tech Challenge FRC - First Robotics Competition
I have a engineering degree and a pure science degree. I would die and go to heaven if I could go to Olin. And yes Dr. Allen Downey is amazing. I have spoken with him when he visited the university I work at, read several of his books and my daughter has already had classes with him teaching Modeling and Simulations with Python.
So, imagine an engineering college where you have a very favorable student:teacher ratio plus a 5min walk to a world class entrepreneurship education.
Many of the olin students are brilliant, quirky, very progressive, want to give back with their high quality (and what used to be 100% fully funded from endowments and grants, think its 50% now) education. Think this is a large point that gets overlooked - graduate an engineering degree debt free and it is easier to give back through a start up or social venture :)
Huge emphasis on actually building things in capstone classes. Fantastic faculty and amazing machine shop resources for such a small school. Some of the best students in my negotiations and accounting classes were from Olin. Additionally wellesley college is a 10 min bus ride for access to top-notch liberal arts classes. Lucky to have that mixture for sure.
They're definitely very different and independent schools, however. While I have several friends from Babson, my social & professional life has drifted away from there. Of the companies mentioned in the article a handful of them (like Big Belly) are the results of fruitful Olin-Babson collaborations. The majority of companies that come out of the two schools, however, have had less cross-campus collaboration than I think many would like.
I'm sure this won't satisfy everyone, but I wanted to do this analysis now instead of in 40 years, so I had to work with the data I do have. I think this is enough to show at least directionally that Olin is doing a reasonably good job at producing startup founders, though as I raise myself at the end of this article, we won't know for sure until we have some exits and long-term value creation in the future.
I've been a huge fan of Olin's educational model and am proud to have turned down Stanford to go there. From the very first day you get to Olin, you're immediately immersed in a collaborative, figure-it-out-together, project-based environment where failure happens and there's no ceiling to the scope of what you can do.
They also try harder than any curriculum I've seen to really ingrain the importance of an entrepreneurial mindset and user-centered design thinking throughout the program. For example, all sophomores are required to take a set of design classes that forces you (though much struggling) to emphasize the viability and desirability, not just the feasibility, of everything you do. Most classes make you to orally present and really communicate your ideas to an intentionally skeptical audience.
By the time you graduate, many begin to realize how well this actually prepares you to not just make cool things, but also structurally think about what people want and how to realistically make it viably work in the real world.
The tech industry notices as well. Oliners have had an extremely strong tract record, particularly in product management programs, at most of the big companies. If you're a PM at Google, Facebook, or Microsoft, you likely know an Oliner, which given a graduating class 80ish, is pretty good reach. Big company PM programs are also not foreigners to producing a lot of entrepreneurs and I've found many of the skills we were taught in college come around again and again in this industry. These skills are also highly prized by places like HBS, where a disproportionate number of Oliners also find themselves right after graduating.
Right now, we definitely play the law-of-small-numbers game. The school is very new (first class was 2006) and the class sizes intentionally small. The size is limited to ensure Olin can continue to be a laboratory for education pedagogy. Over time, however, I'm definitely optimistic this trend will only continue and I'm prod to have known several of the people mentioned in this article.
If you really wanted to measure how Olin's teaching compares to that of MIT/Stanford, vis-a-vis startup founding success, you could have the other schools "draft" a team of 100 CS students at the beginning of their freshman year, and measure the founding success rate of only those 100 students.
Olin: 1.80% - 4.06%
MIT: 0.71% - 0.81%
Stanford: 0.48% - 0.54%
I don't see why people are arguing that selectivity and small size invalidate the better quality of Olin's education. I learned as much from my peers as from my teachers, not to mention the motivation of peer competition.
A startup does not always equal a business.
Unfortunately we now live in a mindset where the ability to raise capital is the yardstick of success. The yardstick of a business, however, has never changed. It's profit.
How many of these ventures are actually profitable? Not to hate on the school, but if the companies are not profitable then they are basically being taught how to raise capital, not how to run a business. They could be producing Clinkles and Juiceros. Remember that VC funding is also just a gamble that they may make it. Statistically most VC-backed companies don't make it. So that alone should not be a measure of success.
I think a better stat would be percentage of startups out of a school that make it to profitability. Take the NBA 3-point approach. You have to have a minimum number of attempts to be considered. Likewise, a school would have to have a minimum number of startups to come out of it. Then from there you measure the percentage of those startups that are profitable after some agreed upon average age.
A small percentage of a small percentage of graduates might succeed in business. This does not mean they will be wealthy. Some? Maybe. All? Not likely. Which means most will face a lifetime of paying on outrageous student debt that might prevent them from such things as buying a home and saving for retirement. Thirty years of financial slavery isn't a good way to go through life.
I simply can't reconcile this reality with the article.
1. There is more opportunity for Stanford students to pursue graduate degrees, leading many to forgo the entrepreneurial route
2. Stanford students receive better job offers upon graduation, leading many to forgo the entrepreneurial route
3. Stanford attracts more international students who come from countries less encouraging of entrepreneurship
Regarding the first two, I could probably think of 10 more positive reasons the numbers might be what they are. What's perceived as a positive for Olin may actually be due to an inarguably positive thing for Stanford
2. Olin is a great school. I doubt undergraduates from Olin are paid substantially differently from those at Stanford. There is probably data on this.
3. Seems the most likely explanation. Or just random chance.
1) My class had 30+% go into PhD programs, with over half of them receiving Fulbright/NSF/comparable prestigious research grants.
2) Earlier Olin classes graduated a larger percentage of people to take on high-paying jobs at Google/MS/IBM (and later FB/Twitter). It has shifted towards more academia and entrepreneurs
3) As one of (only) four international students in the first class (5% of the incoming class), yes, fewer international students. Yes, international students come from cultures less encouraging of entrepreneurship. While I'm definitely from one of those, being at Olin brought me around to entrepreneurship -- I wasn't interested until nearing graduation, reinforcing the article's point that Olin nurtures and graduates founders more effectively than other schools. I would almost certainly have worked a high-paying software dev job if I attended Stanford instead.
1. Top graduate schools for Olin grads (in order): MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, UC-Berkeley, Cornell. It doesn't seem like people that want to go to grad school are struggling for opportunity.
2. Top employers (in order) for Olin grads: Google, Microsoft, athenahealth, Apple. I'm not sure a better list could be drawn up over the past few years.
http://www.olin.edu/collaborate/careers-graduate-studies/res...
I think [3] could be quite true, and I'm sure there are other potential explanations as well.
My wife and youngest visited in 2015. She is now a first year their. She did a gap year.
Also nice for Olin College to produce so many companies but Stanford's history did not only produce tons of companies but also this place known these days as Silicon Valley (there is no way SV would be the place it is toady without Stanford).
1. Olin gives free tuition or reduced tuition leading to almost no debt. There is probably a positive correlation with not having school debt and starting companies.
2. Olin has a very small population size. The best and the worst cases can always be found in small sample sizes.
3. Schools such as Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, etc. have a wide range of students with wide range of interests. Most people do not go to these schools with the sole purpose of being an entrepreneur. There are many people that become doctors, writers, researchers, etc. and benefit society in other ways. Measuring just one narrow dimension may be understating contribution in other places.
4. Olin seems like a great place. It's small enough and independent enough to take chances in how it educates its students. Most older and more prestigious are more conservative in their teaching methods. Since Olin is fully endowed by one person with an open vision, they are able to do things that other institutions cannot.
is an interesting calculator
plugging in $150K combined income it indicated that hypothetical college age child would pay $44,906 a year to attend
for contrast, given the SAT range of 1470-1550 http://www.olin.edu/admission/class-profiles/2021/
I have looked into controlling for major, but I would need to rework all the data from the Pitchbook report, and I don't have their primary data sources. Surely some founders from those schools come from non-technical majors. If I remove them from the denominator, I'd need to remove them from the numerator as well.
I did start looking at this though, and I don't think it would change the outcome much. At MIT, almost 90% of alumni are in science, math, engineering, and business. At Stanford, it's more than half. So that would change the difference from something like 5x to maybe 2x, and that's without removing the founders of those colleges with non-technical degrees from their list of founders. Harvard might be the more interesting one, where I suspect technical and business degrees are not a clear majority.
But given the wide margin, I don't expect this would change the order of the ranking at all, maybe just my (intentionally) clickbaity headline.
I mean it sounds like a great school, kudos to the staff, but its a silly comparison.
1. If you're graduating highschool and want nothing more than to start an engineering company, and you have the credentials to get into Olin, it is probably worth-while. The social network you'll acquire at Olin will be far more tuned to startups, with a lot of former & current startup founders, VCs, and people really interested in being an early employee at a startup.
2. Whatever Olin is doing right probably doesn't scale to a significantly larger school. If you went from graduating 75 students / year to 1000, you'd lose close contact with the awesome teachers and mentors, your social network would become much more diffuse (right now you could easily know every person in your class, the class before, and the class after yours), and the friendly VCs wouldn't be able to meet and learn about every student and their aspirations.
http://www.olin.edu/news-events/2013/olin-insper-collaborate...
https://engineering.illinois.edu/news/article/2009-10-14-oli...
http://www.olin.edu/news-events/2013/university-texas-el-pas...
Project Based Education can scale. It just takes effort.
What if the segment of Stanford students whose area of study is comparable to that of Olin? What would the ratio be then?
:( That's too bad, I hope they change something. Certainly some people will never benefit from organized learning, and perhaps you're in that category and it's otherwise a great school, but most people aren't like that.
Payments are approximately as follows:
Pay it off in 20 years: $2,100 per month
Pay it off in 30 years: $1,800 per month
This means you'll pay somewhere around $504K to $648K.
If your gross pay is $100K per year that means that, in very rough terms, in California, your effective take-home pay is about $64K per year or $5,333 per month.
Out of that you need to take $2,000 every month for 20 to 30 years and pay your student loan.
That leaves you with $3,333/mo to live.
Median rent for a one bedroom apartment in Los Angeles is $2,000/mo.
You are down to $1,333.
It is nearly impossible to live without a car in a place like Los Angeles. Buy a crappy car and pay for car, gas and insurance. That will easily set you back $500 a month.
Now we are down to $833.
Food, say, about $400 a month.
Down to $433.
Utilities, well, let's say $250/mo to be kind.
Down to $183.
I am not accounting for buying clothes, toilet paper, toothpaste, furniture an occasional outing, etc.
Forget travel. Forget investing. Forget saving.
If you need health insurance you are screwed.
And that, right there, is a formula for financial slavery and pain for decades.
It also means you will almost never buy a house (in CA) unless you get married and your spouse does not come in with massive student loan debt like you. You might want to eliminate all your social interactions at Olin or risk marrying someone with $200K to $300K in debt, just like you.
Not zeroing in on Olin here. We have lots of universities that cost in the range of $40K to $60K a year. In Olin's case the article says that about 3% of the roughly 75 graduates every year become entrepreneurs (not necessarily successful). This means that fully 72 graduates do not. And they get out of there with what can only be described as massive unmanageable debt.
Certain degree programs, such as Mechanical Engineering, simply don't have high earning potential. Someone graduating with $300K in debt and one of these degrees in hand is starting life with a formula for suffering. There are plenty of reasonably priced schools that could cut the cost of these degrees in half and even less.
From my perspective, going to a place like Olin is a terrible mistake. It does not guarantee financial success. The only thing it guarantees is financial hardship. It's an example of how demented things have become due to just how easy it is to get student loans.
arcticfox is probably referring to the title conclusion "Olin College Produces Founders at Five Time the Rate of Stanford" not being the result of selection bias during the analysis phase (as implied for example in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15184748).
The conclusion "Olin College is more effective at turning people into founders than Stanford" is indeed a far more speculative conclusion due to self-selection.
The p-value against this result if this school was as good as Stanford by pure chance is 1/10k. There are only 3k 4 year colleges in the USA. The vast majority of which are significantly worse than Stanford.
It is therefore extremely unlikely that pure chance alone would explain this data point.
Consider the dean of a tiny school wants to be different where the dean of a large school wants to be better at a wide range of things. The first dean will have a larger impact on a smaller number of things. Further, the dean of the smaller schools choice of focus is going to have a major impact.
I'm not talking about whether Olin is a good school, it obviously is. I'm saying that "rate of company founding" is a nonsensical axis of comparison. It's like noting that Olin produces 100% fewer Stanford grads than Stanford does.
Pick one of what?
What you have experienced is confirmation-bias. Whereby, you have interpreted evidence to reaffirm your own beliefs. In this case, your belief is, “Olin College cannot be better than MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and the like because those schools are the best.”
When you allow yourself to succumb to confirmation bias, you close yourself off to the possibility there is a school which prepares students for an entrepreneurial life. Please do not close others off to the same possibility.
Right now most startups are tech heavy. If you have a school with exclusively engineering and technology majors, you're much more likely to have a higher startup rate then a full university.
Hypothesis 2 - the school encourages growth and "spiral learning" - is vague. Going to need more evidence to prove this is a unique characteristic of Olin.
Hypothesis 1 - the school attracts students with a certain risk profile - is precisely the parent's point about selection bias. There is a healthy discussion of this above.
I did not go to Olin, but knew about them from when they were fairly new. Their very existence from the first day has been to produce entrepreneurial students, and their curriculum has always reflected that. IIRC, they don't separate courses based on "engineering" and "entrepreneurship". They aim for every course they teach to be a mix of both. Very few pure "theory" courses. Taking a course in communications? You will learn both the theory (Shannon, etc) and you better build something significant by the end of the semester.
Honestly, from the comments here, I'm surprised at the level of doubt. I thought more people here would be familiar with Olin.
(None of this is to say that they are or are not effective in 2 & 3, but it is a foundational principle of theirs, and I imagine a metric they track - as opposed to typical top schools that claim 3 but are pretty bad at it).
Does Olin produce / graduate founders at ~5 times the rate of Stanford? Yes - no bias.
Is the effect size due to self-selection? Likely at least partially.
What is more likely, is the school does an excellent job affording students the opportunity found successful, venture-backed companies. Similar to the way the Physics professors and curriculum afford physicists the ability to be good at physics.
The fact the article highlights this opportunity for other entrepreneurially minded people, who may want to attend in the future, is exactly what the data in the article is supposed to do.
I don't think there's nearly enough information to determine that confidently, but we're simply talking about beliefs at this point.
Well, the best students self-select into Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, etc.
You're more likely to think something a large percentage of your cohort (and people you closely know personally) goes and does is cool, doable and worthwhile. A chunk of your peers at Olin will go found meaningful companies (startups or "just" businesses) and you will think of taking it up too. I never considered being a founder before going, or even most of my life attending Olin, but it became something I considered very seriously and eventually diving into after graduating, and needless to say best choice of my life.
The other cool thing is even if you don't start your own company, you are part of such a small and tight-knit community with all these founders, and founders-to-be! I have personally worked on projects, lived, or had drinks with all but 3 of the founders mentioned in this article, and I am definitely one of the more introverted people who went there.
My guess is that they only accept kids with a track record of making stuff, like the kids that are in the robotics club.
I've got a sharp kid who I would like to turn into a maker kid but he's currently not that kid. He's a math guy, wants to try and get a PhD in math. I'd be happier for him if he became a maker of things, that's what I am and it's worked out well for me, both financially and it was satisfying.
So I'm wondering if Olin would take on a kid and try and form them into a maker or is that just asking way too much. His GPA is so so, 3.6 something, his ACT is 32 I think, I know the math part was 34. That was his only try at the ACT, he can do better. He's taking a gap year and working on retaking the ACT, he's shooting for a 34-35 overall.
Thanks for any insight and congrats on going to that college, it looks sweet!
They should apply. Many are not makers or robotics. Smart kinds with grit, determination and a willingness to fail to succeed.
That said, the classes aren't going to all be about math and only math, a lot of classes have physical projects. But the projects are tightly integrated with theory. I learned multivariable calculus by modeling a boat with some curves, and then building the boat out of foam to see if the calculated angle at which it tips was the same as reality.
If you kid can get excited about project-based learning, Olin is an awesome option.
I'd be happy to talk to you more if you have more questions.
1) To be completely honest I can't speak to the current admission climate and criteria, I enrolled in 2007 with the 5th class. Things have likely changed a lot (they do when the institute is that young and application and admission demographics change rapidly at this age).
2) Myself, I grew up in a quiet conservative Middle Eastern city (first international cohort rep!), never "made" things that I could put on a resume, and mostly just had solid grades in math/sci/compsci. I had solid SAT scores, never took the ACT, and my GPA was hard to translate (I didn't attend an AP/IB curriculum) for direct comparisons. The admissions team emphasizes that individual scores are of low relevance, as are aggregate GPAs -- Olin is primarily looking for kids who show a passion and/or aptitude in STEM/entrepreneurship which can't always be represented by scores. This is why the final stage of the admission process is a weekend-long in-person interview+team builds+campus tours where they (and you) try to evaluate whether you will survive/flourish/despise Olin's pedagogical practices, and this is ultimately the deciding factor. Parents are welcome.
3) As Olin grows older, the graduating classes have polarized more and more into founders, and pure scientists. My class ('11) had ~35% join PhD programs in everything from solar power to cancer biology, over half with prestigious grants such as NSF. And more people are becoming not only founders, but embarking on various philanthropic and/or entrepreneurial journeys, from SV startups to building solar cookers in West Africa. This is a shift away from joining Google/Microsoft/Facebook/IBM/etc, which clumped was previously the largest cohort of a graduating class (and has shrunk to ~20% now).
The hypothesis is that both these people are actually the same -- they absorb skills, look at the world, try to reason from first principles and their recently gained knowledge whether something could/should exist and improve human lives, and then just goes and does it. Pure academics is the long-term pursuit of human improvement, contributing to the greater corpus of human awareness, and entrepreneurship/makerhood is the near-term, fast-moving version. They are just essentially the same mindset applied on different timeframes.
My point is that I think you shouldn't worry about which of these perspectives he pursues at this point -- if he's the kind of kid who'll like it at Olin (he may not), the path he'll eventually take will be influenced by where he feels he can contribute the most effectively. Olin will give him some exposure to more people on the maker-side of that spectrum.
This is not dissimilar from the old boy network that makes Washington and Lee the single university which most increases your median earning potential. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Magazine%27s_Lis... for where I got that from.)
I just am dismayed that my kids don't build stuff. Building stuff has brought me so much pleasure and satisfaction. I want that for them, for their happiness, not mine. I'll be gone one day and I want them to be good whatever they do.
If you looked only at the subset of Stanford students with similar interests and backgrounds to Olin’s student population, you’d probably end up with a similar distribution of outcomes.