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Is Stanford Too Close To Silicon Valley?
nicholast writes "The New Yorker has a story by Ken Auletta about the connections between Stanford and Silicon Valley. The piece explains how important the university is to tech companies and venture capital firms, but it also questions whether Stanford has become too focused on wealth. 'It's an atmosphere that can be toxic to the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake,' says one professor. The piece also explains Stanford's conflicted thoughts about distance education, which could transform the university or prove to be a threat to it."
Yes, New Yorker, you really hit the nail on the head there. Foolishly concentrating on marketable skills and useful scholarship, instead of the laudable pursuits like LGBT studies and Russian literature. New York institutions have it right - charge a lot and turn out people who have nothing productive to contribute and nothing better to do than occupy Wall Street (i.e crap in public and shout slogans) and whine about having to pay back their student loans!
My university's model is to attract as many international students as possible and charge them 3x the 'domestic' tuition rate, which is already high for Canada. Better yet is a privately-owned college they've licensed our 'brand' to, which allows them to do the same but with dirt-low entrance requirements and higher yet tuition!
Even my previous institute, a very small liberal arts university on the opposite coast, was showing shades of the same. What else do we expect with burgeoning human resources departments and shrinking public funding?
Hey mate, spare a sig?
Can't tell you how helpful having some Middle-Manager type making an appearance in the interview room, proudly proclaiming his Stanford Alumni status and MENSA membership before laying out the all important "brain teaser" to save me from taking the interview any further. Funny how the recruiter mentioned beforehand that they were having such a hard time finding qualified candidates.
questions whether Stanford has become too focused on wealth.
I think that boat had sailed a loooong time ago. Most research universities are quite focused on wealth. The total amount of grants brought in matters most in tenure decisions (and who cares about teaching).
So next time you meet Mensa member be sure to ask them how their investment club is doing.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake
It was really nice when the college's mission used to be refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake, but in today's shrinking economy that is (more and more) no longer the case. Now-a-days not only does the college as a whole feel immense budget pressure, but if individual departments don't ante up each year then they'll be on the chopping block
It's more than a little insulting when scientists and engineers are painted with the "uncreative and money grubbing" label simply because we work on things that have practical value.
I don't understand why anyone would criticize a university for training students to "serve the public" and for having an unusually happy and diverse student body.
Stanford was the finalist for opening an extension in NYC, but backed out when NYC changed the terms.
Is William and Mary too close to Camp Perry?
Stanford has become more like that. Some of this comes from a big organizational change.
I went through Stanford in the 1980s. (MSCS, 1985). Stanford hadn't really started operating innovation as a profit center at that time. Their biggest revenue patent was the one for FM music synthesis, the technology used by electronic keyboards before sampling. There's been much financial progress since then.
In 1991, Stanford spun off the management of its endowment to the http://www.smc.stanford.edu/">Stanford Management Company. Many universities have an organization to manage their endowment, but Stanford's is more active than most. SMC isn't on campus. It's located on Sand Hill Road, next to the famous office park where all the major venture capitalists have offices. SMC invests in venture capital firms, and this has worked out very well. Stanford directly owns part of Google, part of Cisco, part of Sun, part of Facebook... Stanford has $27 billion in investment assets. (Harvard is still ahead, at $32 billion, but Stanford is catching up.)
Arguably, Stanford is a venture capital firm which runs a school on the side for the tax break.
Soon Stanford will have tens of thousands of students around the world, via the WWW.
Here we have a nice article about one certain school becoming too tightly focused, and perhaps overspecialized... conveniently ignoring "sports" schools which are a complete farce as degree granting institutions.
At least Standford is dealing with marketable, long-term job creating fields. If you think they need to tweak their focus a bit, that's fair. But if you're really interested in improving the collegiate scene as a whole I'd start with the students who are lined up for the picking this Thursday (that would be the NFL Draft, for those not in the know)
This signature is false.
Sure Stanford is 'close' to Silicon Valley, although depends on what one means by 'too close'. If by Silicon Valley, one is talking about the Santa Clara county cities, like Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, San Jose, Milpitas, Mountain View, and just outside it, Fremont, then yeah, Stanford is just a 10 minute drive on the 280 and 20 minute drive on the 101. Fifteen minutes on El Camino Real.
TFA, it's good that Stanford & Berkeley are there to service the Bay Area companies, or whatever's left of them.
Invariably the person will not have solved the problem themselves - they're simply repeating an interesting problem that they read about some time in the past. Oftentimes they read that it makes for a good interview question.
You handle this by exclaiming "you like puzzles? That's great! I love puzzles too, here's one for you..." and then give the simplest, least obvious, most vexing conundrum you have. Look this up ahead of time so you have one ready to use.
Let them sputter and hem and haw for a minute, then give them another one. "Or how about this one - it's one of my favourites!"
Depending on how trashed you think the interview is (from when the manager burst in the first time), you can turn the screws a little. If you're not getting the job anyway, you can reverse it so that it seems like you don't *want* the job because no one else in the company can pass *your* puzzle requirements. "Oh, I thought you had a lot of bright, motivated, self-starting individuals. That's what the job requirements said you wanted...".
I keep a Chinese block puzzle in my pocket for just such occasions.
No interviewing manager has ever had the guts to refuse my puzzle after asking their pet puzzle question, and I have yet to find one who was any good at puzzles.
Oh, and I also got a lot of job offers.
am i the only one that thought that Stanford was a city in Florida where "Stand Your Ground' means you cna chase after a (black) youth in a hoodie and shoot him, and call it self defense
It's not that Stanford is too focused on Silicon Valley. It's that Silicon Valley is too focused on Stanford.
As an outsider to the valley, I find it pretty creepy how obsessed everyone is about Stanford and Stanford grads. It's as if, when one of them walks in the room, I'm supposed to cream my jeans over his very presence. Sure, some of them are smart, but so are some east coast state school graduates, community college graduates, and non-college-grads. I don't quite understand the "oooooooh Staaaaaaanford!" aura.
It's also pretty shitty that "Went to Stanford" is often an un-spoken, "soft" job requirement for more than a few valley tech companies.
Suggesting that because the university has fostered a large number of financially successful commercial ventures, that it could be toxic to the education of innovators is completely lame. In fact, it is so lame that I wonder if the topic was entirely made up for lack of content. Technological innovation can do 3 things that matter: 1. Advance society, making us all better in some way. 2. Foster financial stability for large numbers of people. 3. Raise questions about either number one or number two. Without financially successful technological innovation, we'd be Cuba in the 50's. Really happy, not that prosperous, and ready for a big change that would fuck us all.
-- http://www.criticalassets.com
It's Time To Charge Colleges With Fraud And Racketeering
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=205124
Main drawback of Stanford: the girls aren't hot. Maybe if they weren't so close to Silicon Valley they could attract some hotter girls.
Seriously though, the main thing about Stanford is that there are a ton of entrepreneurial examples floating around. Most people at Stanford think (whether it is true or not) along the lines of "hey, I'm as smart or smarter than that guy. I can start a company too." That's about all it takes to build a culture of entrepreneurship. This is a good thing for the ones who have what it takes to be entrepreneurs (Yes, I am biased as an alum and an entrepreneur - the programming, marketing, accounting, project classes were worth every cent) - for those who are going to be employees - not so much: I find it hard to hire from Stanford for the sheer hubris granted them by nearly guaranteed offers from Google. Berkeley kids and students from the Midwest are much more humble and a better value (also less likely to leave after a year to start their own competing startup).
1 billion Papiermark (Germany) wasn't worth a lot as well, in 1922. Maybe the figure has more to tell about the value of the US Dollar than it has about the value of the company in question?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Could be a big job moving a university however
Oh wait.....
one percenter Stanford grads!
The most labyrinthine mind I have ever met was an MIT student majoring in economics. He was hired back in the mid eighties as a summer intern at a defense contractor and tasked with writing a fairly straightforward cross reference program (One input file and one output file) for which I had prepared a Warnier diagram. He tossed the design aside and produced a program that contained seven different read statements and three different write statements. I had to debug the program afterwards; It was a virtual reconstruction of the Winchester Mystery House. I realized at that time that admission to a prestigious universities does not mean the person can produce a usable deliverable.
Yes, New Yorker, you really hit the nail on the head there. Foolishly concentrating on marketable skills and useful scholarship, instead of the laudable pursuits like LGBT studies and Russian literature. New York institutions have it right - charge a lot and turn out people who have nothing productive to contribute and nothing better to do than occupy Wall Street (i.e crap in public and shout slogans) and whine about having to pay back their student loans!
Look it. Kids aren't stupid. Very few people are stupid enough to beleive the "do what you love and the money will follow."
The job market is soooo bad, there are folks with accounting degrees, engineering degrees and the most surprising to me - nursing degrees - that are unable to get a job. The American Journal of Nursing reported last year that the job market for newly graduated nurses is one of the worst ever. And there's supposed to be a shortage right? Lawyers are having a horrible time too. I haven't seen the stats on new med school grads so I can't comment on that.
And even if you did get into some "marketable" program things change - fast - in this day age. That's what happened to all those nrusing students. Four or five years ago, those kids went to nursing school because that's what they wanted - a marketable and hopefully, a guaranteed job. They graduted in '11 and low and behold over half of them can't get jobs. And there's even more people currently in school because the word hasn't gotten out. Yes, we will have a glut of nurses in a fe short years and folks will be saying, "Gee! Why didn't they get a degree in something marketable!? Morons!"
Back in the 80s there were people studying Chinese lterature. The had to learn to read and speak Manderin. Then the 90s came and globalization - and all that trade with China. In the 80s I remember folks studying math. And back then, if you weren't actuarial, you would have to teach - it wasn't that marketable. (Actuarial is TOUGH. I've seen people wash out of that and go to engineering school for something easier.) Then the 90s came and search engines and applications that were math intensive. All of a suddent a math degree was the thing to get.
What's "marketable" today could very well be saturated or have no market in a few years.
This is nothing new, and nothing unique to Stanford. Here's a page from history:
(That page is a chapter in a much larger book about the modern education system, by the way, which is well worth a read in its entirety.)
Liberty in your lifetime
Let us contemplate this...
LBGT studies, Womyn's studies, etc. would be tolerable if they were minors within a broader liberal arts background that at least left students with broad exposure to math, literature, philosophy, logic and other things which constituted the traditional liberal arts path. Instead, you have these insular majors which tend to focus on grievances that the group that is being "studied" has with American society. All of that to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per year which leaves students at these universities absolutely crippled without even a rigorous, broad liberal arts education that might prepare them for SOMETHING productive down the road.
Tech / Vocational / Community do need more respect and yes some jobs do need post high school trading. But there is Too Much Emphasis On College Education ,ECT when some kind of Badges system is a better fit.
http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/CollegeForAll/intro.html
and not all trading is a good in to a 2 year or 4 year or more College plan. Part or issues of tech schools and some class plans in community is that they try to fit a trades / tech class plan in to a BA, AA
http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/
tech / vol / community schools do offer night , on line , drop in and take in non-matriculated students. Tech does have a lot of needed on going learning and 2 more years of college is not a good fit.
It is a issue when you have a DIGITAL MEDIA that offers a 2 (college class load) year very hands on Film + Broadcast plan but then you have things like a TV channel wanting a 4 year degree in Communications to work in master control? For one thing a communications BA is a poor fit for a very tech / hands on job.
You also have issues in tech jobs where mainly on the College site you have the big catch all CS that can very a lot from school to school that is mostly geared to programming / high level design work. The tech / vol / community do offer more classes / a better over all plan that covers the needed skills with less of the high level stuff that does not help you on the job.
In the 1960's when I made up my list of colleges to apply to, Stanford was not on the list; my father, a CalTech grad, would have disowned me. We know some kids that went to Stanford. We said "it figures."
then make community college that base level and say that jobs can't say you need a BA or higher when the job does not need it.
For lot's of tech jobs tech training is better then BA in CS.
Seems natural for it to be close to it...
Do you even taste the aftertaste in the Kool Aid these days? If you look at the unemployment stats for engineers, they're typically well below the national average and people with real liberal arts educations are badly unemployed or underemployed.
A few shifts of the San Andreas fault and they'll be farther apart.
Have gnu, will travel.
Your post would be considerably more credible if it was grammatically correct. I went to a Community College and I'm annoyed at how sloppy your post is. Thanks for making the rest of us appear semi-literate.
They really should get their heads on straight and focus on the stuff that matters like a top notch football and basketball team.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Tech / Vocational / Community do need more respect and yes some jobs do need post high school trading.
But there is Too Much Emphasis On College Education
http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/CollegeForAll/intro.html [ed.gov] and not all trading is a good fit in to a 2 year or 4 year or more College plan.
Part or issues of tech schools and some class plans in community is that they try to fit a trades / tech class plan in to a BA, AA ,ECT when some kind of Badges system is a better fit.
http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/
The tech / vol / community schools do offer night, on line , drop in and take in non-matriculated students. The tech Feld does have a lot of needed on going learning and 2 more years of college is not a good fit.
It is an issue when you have a DIGITAL MEDIA that offers a 2 (college class load) year very hands on Film + Broadcast plan but then you have things like a TV channel wanting a 4 year degree in Communications to work in master control? For one thing a communications BA is a poor fit for a very tech / hands on job.
You also have issues in tech jobs where mainly on the College site you have the big catch all CS that can very a lot from school to school that is mostly geared to programming / high level design work. The tech / vol / community do offer more classes / a better overall plan that covers the needed skills with less of the high level stuff that does not help you on the job.
See, I felt the opposite and feel he was turning it around on assholes. Asking a brain teaser at an interview is just plain stupid. Unless the job is solving brain teaser or alien languages what value is a question like that? None. It is a job and 99% of the time the job function will be mundane and routine.
Now a good interview would ask about current events, thoughts on direction in the industry of choice or any other manner of questioning that gets into who the person is, what they think about, and will they fit with a group. The next time I get asked what are the principles of Object Oriented Programming are, I may just sum it into one phrase "get the job done well", as to whether I know encapsulation, polymorphism, or the rest of the esoteric terms has no value to my work.
I disagree with the AC who termed the other person a a-hole. However, I disagree with you more - if you think encapsulation and polymorphism are esoteric terms of no value, I fear to ever see your code. You can't get the job done well with OOP without knowing those, unless by "done well" you mean it compiles and runs (which is just half the battle to a job well done.) Also, "get the job done well" is not an attribute specific to OOP. You get the job done well regardless of the paradigm (procedural, modular, or OOP.)
Seriously, do you really believe encapsulation and polymorphism are esoteric terms of no value? If you do, more power to you in the land of OOP hyper-lasagna and procedural hyper-spaghetti spread across un-cohesive classes.
I would have to say that this is more insightful than funny.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1789018/occupy-wall-street-demographics-statistics
^-- Most are employed and only about a quarter are students.
As for having to pay back student loans, on a you've got to pay your debts level I agree with your sentiment, but there is a larger issue at hand. So many have such debt that (a) it is silly to think they will be ever be able to pay it back, which reduces their chances of being a good consumer / has an effect on us all and (b) we have to ask ourselves, why is our system so screwed up that they were charged as much as they were for tuition and for the interest on the loans, and allowed to take so much out in the first place? A less enlightened response would say they should have worked during forgetting (1) a lot do, (2) some material is so demanding it's insanely unrealistic and (3) the state of the economy and I'm not talking about since 2008 but rather the fact that purchasing power has flat lined for at least thirty years. Now you may comment.
but what happens when it goes to MA, PHD for base level?
Also what about trades like training?
but what happens when it goes to MA, PHD for base level?
The student debt will just get that much higher. Unless the education bubble eventually bursts, the day people start defaulting on their debt repayments.
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
I would say that to some degree this has already started. If more people choose to obtain BA level educations, it will become more widespread. After that, some new filter will have to be found. It doesn't necessarily have to be education-based. Education has just been the easy target so far. But perhaps the educational institutions will accommodate by offering increasing levels of education, or maybe you'll need multiple degrees to even be considered?
Many trades built their own filtering framework outside of the university setting, typically through apprenticeship programs. From what I gather from those industries, there isn't a huge fight to fill the available spots, so it seems to serve them well. If, in the future, more people want to enter those industries, you might need a degree before you can start apprenticing as means to filter the number of applicants again.
Thank you, please drive thru.