
YC: The new grad school - brezina
http://www.mattbrezina.com/blog/2011/04/yc-the-new-grad-school/
======
rivalis
This is dubious; the whole "higher education vs. entrepreneurship" discourse
is a false dichotomy. What has happened is that capitalism has degraded most
peoples' perceptions of the goals of higher education: they think it is meant
to give them skills for a job or something. Higher education is meant to
transform the student's ability to think, such that they can contribute truly
new knowledge to society. This often involves less than spectacular monetary
compensation for long and painful hours.

The tension between the job training mission imposed by a capitalist society
and the more traditional humanist "transformational" mission has watered down
the educational system.

As someone who chose education for the sake of education with my eyes wide
open and not expecting much in the way of dollars afterward, I applaud the
decisions of entrepreneurs to recognize the mission confusion of colleges and
simply leave.

Institutions should be like UNIX programs: they should do one thing and do it
well. I think that it would be in everyone's best interest to pull job
training right out of colleges and use the YC model.

~~~
pg
While I would never have called YC the new grad school myself, I think you
have a mistakenly utopian view of the origins of western higher education. The
"traditional" idea of a liberal education you're describing is largely a
creation of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Originally higher
education was about training priests, lawyers, and doctors.

As learning became more prestigious, rich kids started going to universities
as well. They were not there for vocational training. But they were the
newcomers. The original model of university student was the one Westfall
described in his excellent biography of Newton: "a plodding group, narrowly
vocational in outlook, lower-class youths grimly intent on ecclesiastical
preferment as the means to advancement."

If anyone wants to learn more about the origins of universities, I'd recommend
Haskins's _Rise of the Universities_.

~~~
apu
Off-topic, but how do you always know the best books for each historical
topic? I've tried looking for books on specific topics but there seems to be
no good way of finding the gems (amazon and other recommendation sites of its
ilk have not yielded any successes for me).

Also, how do I know which books are most accurate? Looking at current
political or biographical books, I see how slanted almost all books are
because I have many other sources to go on and the relevant context to judge a
book's accuracy. But all of this context is missing for historical books so I
have no way of judging how biased or inaccurate they are.

What if I were learning history from the equivalent of a Glenn Beck?

~~~
pg
It's somewhat of an illusion. I only know the best books about subjects I
understand fairly well, and I also try only to comment about subjects I
understand.

Interesting question how to tell whether you're reading a biased account. It
would take an essay to answer that. After you know some history, you can tell
because biases causes their owners to make mistakes. But there's probably also
internal evidence too. Never seeming surprised would be a bad sign, for
example.

~~~
VaedaStrike
"After you know some history, you can tell because biases causes their owners
to make mistakes."

The catch--

"History is a set of lies agreed upon" - Napoleon Bonaparte

The whole "after you know some history" demands a framework of a macrocosm to
which one must depend entirely upon second-hand, at best, accounts. The glue
that holds it all together is so tied to so many handles for bias both at the
hands of the proxy observers as well as within the very bonding agents in the
mind of the aggregator that the whole enterprise is rife with corruptive
feedback potential that the anomalies that can be conclusively nailed as bona
fide mistakes tend to be, for the most part, minimally useful for bias
detection that tells you something you didn't already have a rather high
certainty of.

~~~
apu
_The glue that holds it all together is so tied to so many handles for bias
both at the hands of the proxy observers as well as within the very bonding
agents in the mind of the aggregator that the whole enterprise is rife with
corruptive feedback potential that the anomalies that can be conclusively
nailed as bona fide mistakes tend to be, for the most part, minimally useful
for bias detection that tells you something you didn't already have a rather
high certainty of._

wat.

Seriously, it took me something like 4 minutes to understand what you wrote
there. Maybe I'm just tired.

~~~
VaedaStrike
No. I was tired. Hence my failure to properly punctuate and clearly enunciate.

My apologies, to all.

------
edw519
If YC is grad school, then Hacker News is on-line university.

The links to good articles are the curriculum.

The links to good references are the text books.

The debates and discussions are the study groups.

The "Ask HN" posts are the mentorships.

The projects we push each other to do are independent studies.

The community is my adult fraternity.

I've been here 4 years - I oughta try to get my diploma.

[Aside: Kinda ironic that your blog banner has a picture of my graduate
school. The University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Business was in the 42
story Cathedral of Learning (the tall building on the right) where we took
higher education quite literally.]

~~~
amix
If YC is a grad school, then doing a startup is a way to learn and graduate.
Hanging around on HN should be viewed as entertainment. That's at least my
experience (I have been on HN for the past 3.5+ years).

------
shriphani
In the past grad students gave us : -> Relational databases -> Polynomial time
deterministic algorithms for testing primality -> Shannon's masters thesis
etc. etc.

I still don't believe that Google itself could have produced so excellent a
product outside an environment that a top graduate school offers.

The concept of advancing the boundaries of the field is noble - the idea of
making $$ out of it should hardly be the motivation IMO.

------
adamsmith
* The practicum is launching your first product.

* The Tuesday dinners are the weekly lectures.

* The coursework is Hacker News.

* Your fraternity brothers are the YC alums

* And unlike contributions to your university’s general fund – when you invest in Y Combinator you get a return.

Wow!

~~~
shawnee_
And $150K is your student loan (at least for the new enrollments)

If it's not a gift and you haven't earned it, it's a loan.

~~~
justin
Convertible notes are a type of loan -- doesnt have anything to do with
"earning it"

------
kenjackson
This is a pretty good characterization.

In CS at least, YC is very similar.

In both, most students don't pay to attend.

In both, most students get some funding -- a small amount of pocket change to
buy ramen.

In both you'll work heads down in a way you've likely never done before, nor
will do after.

In both your output, will hopefully, have you set for life.

In both you're surrounded by some of the best talent you'll likely see again
doing the same thing you're doing.

Just about the only major difference is coursework (HN is really isn't
equivalent). Of course, I've probably made some big assumptions and missed
things having never gone through YC, but my short take.

~~~
yid
I really enjoy your rational comments when it comes to this whole higher
education vs. dropout ("uncollege") debate, which seems to have engulfed HN
lately. Thanks for being a voice of reason.

------
pauldisneyiv
From an outsider - I feel the parallels are closer to being punched into an
elite Finals Club than a grad school.

The alumni network is smaller and likely more powerful.

Admittance into the club will carry more weight in future endeavors.

A very small percentage of hopefuls are accepted.

This isn't meant to be negative - I just feel it is a more apt comparison.

------
yid
Perhaps a new _business_ school...certainly not all of grad education.

~~~
brezina
I'll argue that the most important part of grad school is/was the people. And
that is the element YC nailed for me.

I also had to teach myself a bunch of technical stuff to get xobni off the
ground. Unlike grad courses this stuff was practical by definition.

For me YC and YC alums more closely fit the profile of an engineering grad
program than a MBA program.

~~~
_delirium
Are we talking about masters or PhD version of grad school? I could buy it for
a masters-replacement. But an engineering PhD is supposed to be _producing_
new basic technology, not _learning_ existing technology, and ideally
producing new technology that requires multi-year research to produce.

That's also possible to do in a more innovation/research-focused startup
(biotech does this all the time), but it's not particularly common in tech
startups afaik, mostly because "multi-year research 'til product" is not what
investors want to hear.

Granted, the results are not always amazing in grad-school either, but quite a
bit of basic research in PLs, systems, algorithms, etc. does come out of PhD
theses. Could you really do something like Okasaki's "Purely Functional Data
Structures" within the YC program?

Graham himself is actually doing an outside-of-academia version of PLs
research with Arc. But most of the YC companies don't seem to be embarking on
Arc-type projects.

------
pgbovine
apologies in advance for the self-post, but i wrote a somewhat-related article
a few years ago about how the grad school research world can actually be
similar to the start-up world, even though they seem like polar opposites at
first glance: <http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/research-and-startup.htm>

~~~
mitultiwari
thanks for sharing the link. nicely written article. apart from "formulating",
"executing", and "selling" i would like to add two more steps in the beginning
"survey" and "identify open problems". i would say in startup world also
survey (competitive research) and "open problems" (novelty) are important.

------
edanm
"And unlike contributions to your university’s general fund – when you invest
in Y Combinator you get a return"

Interesting concept. Why _aren't_ there schools who teach a specific job,
which don't take money, but instead take a percentage of salary from the
students for some fixed time? That way they have incentive to be good
teachers.

~~~
phlux
Because Stanford can charge a huge tuition and _still_ get incredible
endowments from alumn.

~~~
sbisker
I wonder to what extent will programs like YC be funded by "donation"
investments in the future? You only need a few Herokus to make enough
successful founders for quite an "alumni" investment fund...and unlike my
college alumni progam, few alumni would argue about "how their money is being
spent". The only real problem I see in this is that it scales exponentially
faster than PG is able to scale the number of companies he advises - but that
might be solvable by, say, reducing the return of "donation" investments to
make them more like pure "donations".

Just like regular colleges, you can focus on alumni while still taking money
and guidance from other interested organizations (like Sequoia) for the
benefit of the participants.

------
davidwparker
Very interesting. I'm curious as to how you would get into this grad school as
a single founder?

It was easy for me to get into grad school (I'm there now), but without a co-
founder, I feel as though it would be very difficult to get into YCombinator,
and I'll most likely meet my future co-founder here at grad school.

------
MrMan
aaahhhhh you guys are going collectively insane.

------
mindball
I have to agree with you regarding the way everything is going. Grad school is
a very common for everyone to have so being part of something like YC or TS is
just another avenue to expand your education in exchange for a piece of
equity.

------
umdred11
Yeah, well, the University of Maryland hates you too.

But, good article.

~~~
brezina
haha - it wasn't all bad. Just nothing, i repeat nothing like my experience
with YC.

------
delinquentme
sidenote: went to penn state... lives in SF ... has Pitt's cathedral of
learning as header??

------
k3dz
in practicum, YC may be simliar to CS but in theory, i doubt it gets anywhere
near the breadth or the depth of a CS grad school curriculum

------
tybris
Something, the new something unrelated.

