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Comment by devmunchies | Hacker News Reader

> Olin College, a small engineering school in Needham, MA, which graduates around 75 students per year

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).

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The college encourages an entrepreneurial attitude, but is not focused explicitly on getting alumni to start companies. But you do see a lot of Olin alumni joining early startups as well as big companies. Google was the largest employer of Olin alumni in the first two years (2006-2007), mostly through the new-at-the-time APM program. A few years later, it was Microsoft. Now Pivotal is high up the list. You also see Olin alumni joining early startups that they did not found as early employees (Square, AirBnB, Adroll off the top of my head).

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.

when you say "Google was the largest employer of Olin alumni" do you mean like, what, 3 to 10 people? Its too small to even compare to Stanford. Its apples to appleseeds.

I mean it sounds like a great school, kudos to the staff, but its a silly comparison.

Two thoughts:

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.

They are working with larger engineering schools to bring some of their learnings to the other schools.

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.

With ballooning administrative ratios... it's probably not as much effort as one would think. It just requires the University to focus on education rather than administration.

Agreed. It's a pretty silly oversight by the author. And a meaningless measure.

What if the segment of Stanford students whose area of study is comparable to that of Olin? What would the ratio be then?

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