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."

Comments

That problem is not unique to Stanford

[sackvillian]

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?

Mensa is the problem

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Once someone tells me they're in Mensa, they are immediately labeled as an idiot. This of course is due to the biggest idiots I have personally known were in Mensa. Then there's the Mensa investment club, its been a failure 20 years and counting.

So next time you meet Mensa member be sure to ask them how their investment club is doing.

Stanford Management Company, the real reason

[Animats]

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.

Re:Stanford Management Company, the real reason

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole idea of a non-profit entity is a myth. The money always goes somewhere. In a typical well-run and well-meaning non-profit charity, some of the money goes to the charity's beneficiaries (they profit), and some of it goes to pay non-volunteer employees (especially upper management), who also profit. Because the profits aren't at the "corporate" level, but instead disbursed to "beneficiaries" and "employees", we senselessly call it non-profit. In a for-profit public corporation, the shareholders form a collective entity which acts like an upper management position, and they take home profit in terms of market returns. In a private one it's the same thing, but the pool of shareholders is a small private club. There's really not a huge difference here, especially when you start bending the rules by calling SMC a non-profit university when they're raking in $27B via private equity investments. I guess the students and professors are the ultimate beneficiaries of the profits, and then buy into the system through tuition, time served, and using their talents to promote Stanford's name.

I'd take the original description a step further. Stanford is a venture capital firm which re-invests some of its profits in operating a side-business school which very successfully specializes in creating more entrepreneurs which will create more tech startups for Stanford to invest in. They've created a feedback loop of money, and the students/profs-cum-entrepreneurs and various Stanford faculty that derive money on the side from their positions in this scheme all benefit from the profits of the system as a whole.

Label it whatever you want, but they certainly don't need to steal from my income taxes to fund themselves at this point, so I'd rather they didn't get free tax-break government handouts :P

How to handle mensa types

[Okian Warrior]

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.

Re:How to handle mensa types

[Bucc5062]

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.

The other way around...

[Stiletto]

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.

absurd notion

[ohzero]

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.

Re:Stanford Grads are Awesome

[vought]

Exactly. Consensus hiring is Stanford voodoo clubhouse bullshit too - "we all thought you were awesome, but Arnie here wants to hire the girl with big tits who is almost as good as you, so...see you later!"

I live in Silicon Valley and most of the recent Stanford grads I meet are like West Coast Romneys: legacy kids, well-heeled by their own rich parents and friends, and already assured of that new 5-series or a spot at the VC table, no matter how stupid the idea is (paying 1 billion for Instagram...).

Yeah - I resent the hell out of the culture here. It's gone from what you know to who you know in 20 years. Now, instead of building things in Silicon Valley, we just reinvent the same scams to fleece money from consumers - thanks in part to your Stanford MBAs.

Re:Such a quaint definition of college...

[DrEasy]

That's why I wish vocational schools had more prestige. There needs to be clear a distinction made between learning skills and getting an education. Neither is a bad thing in itself. I believe that learning skills, at a School (could be anything, ranging from Engineering to Law, Medicine, Journalism, Design, etc), can be viewed as an investment in the future (in terms of getting a job), and as such it is ok for it to rely on tuition fees. But getting an education, at a true University (with Arts, Math, Physics, History, Social Sciences, etc.), should be something that is fully subsidized. It wouldn't cost as much as you think to fund, since not many people would gravitate toward it in the first place. Once it's made clear that a University won't get you a job, you will only have people who go there who don't quite yet know what to do with their lives (until they figure out that to get a job they should go to a School), or people who have truly scholarly interest in the topic at hand.

There would be bridges between the two, of course. Schools would most likely require some courses to be taken at a University (this way, Schools would also partially subsidize Universities).