Generally speaking, the point of college is to graduate. Dropping out means you failed on the most basic, fundamental level. At Stanford, however, where many of the school’s most successful alumni were dropouts, those rules don’t necessarily hold true. The onetime home of the dropout who founded Snapchat, the grad students behind Google, and the former students who launched WhatsApp, Netflix, LinkedIn and Yahoo, Stanford has established itself as the largely uncontested mecca of tech, where the best and brightest go to launch their careers — often well before graduation.
As a brand new class of freshmen prepare to seek their tech fortunes, a recent New York Magazine feature took a deep dive into the school that has become “less a college than a kind of incubator or accelerator — a four-year networking opportunity for the next Systrom, Spiegel, or Thiel.”
If we’ve learned anything from the college admissions scandal, it’s that people take the advantages elite schools boast very seriously. With the lowest acceptance rate among major universities, Stanford has been the reigning, Princeton Review-confirmed “dream school” among high school students and their parents for a decade. But most young Stanford hopefuls aren’t looking to make four years of lasting memories with friends on the green before receiving their diploma in front of family and loved ones; they’re looking to get in, network with Silicon Valley elite, and move on as quickly as possible to a high-paying tech job or launch a genius startup, with or without a degree.
“It really always felt like it’s that gold mine, like you’re just there to find that random idea and hop on that train and have $100 million by the time you’re 30,” a political-science major from the class of 2017 told the magazine.
From where to rub elbows with local venture capitalists (Coupa Café outside Green Library is reportedly a notorious VC hangout) to which classes are basically job fairs (one student received a $5 million job offer after presenting his CS 221 project), the unofficial handbook for Stanford freshmen contains a lot more than a campus map and meal plan info. Stanford kids don’t want to know how to make it to graduation, they want to know how to make it before graduation.
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