> If anything, the greatest threat today to established higher education is the likes of YC.
You're joking, right? Y Combinator and accelerators like it are great programs for certain types of individuals, but they're hardly a threat to the higher education industrial complex.
Y Combinator has produced some great successes, but despite all the resources and access Y Combinator provides participants, Y Combinator has not discovered a recipe for startup success. The numbers make this very clear[1][2].
More importantly, there is only so much room to scale accelerator programs. Few companies emerge from these programs with cash flow sufficient to fund their operations, so they depend on the availability of angel and venture capital to support their portfolio companies. If you significantly expand the Y Combinators of the world, demand for capital would soon exceed supply, so you'd see a dramatic increase in the percentage of portfolio companies that die, and the speed with which they die.
> Y Combinator has not discovered a recipe for startup success.
Nor has Harvard university. I think you're looking at the wrong output. YC (and other successful incubators) are about the alumni network, not the success of the startup. Just as universities are about the alumni network.
There is a good deal of research that has concluded attending an elite private university has a significant impact on career earnings[1][2].
If you are suggesting that the Y Combinator alumni network is of immense tangible value, what research do you have to back it up? To be fair to you, there obviously isn't a whole lot of longitudinal data, but as I pointed out, Y Combinator's portfolio stats look pretty much in line with what you'd expect in Silicon Valley.
The value of an alumni network is tied to what it can reasonably do for you. Ivy League alumni networks have been tapped for decades for lucrative opportunities not easily accessed by outsiders.
I agree with you that YC and things like it are not a real threat to higher education, but not because of the (relative) lack of success in the companies that have gone through them. The question that matters is which of the two produces people with skills more widely valuable to society. That is a harder question to get hard data on, but it seems clear to me that the skills gained in building a (usually technology-focused) startup, while valuable, are extremely narrow in scope when compared with the aggregate of all the different skills different people gain in college.
You make an interesting point, but keep in mind that individuals attend university because of what they believe it will do for them as individuals, not because they believe it will benefit society. University is promoted as and widely perceived to be the key to a middle class life. That's why many folks are willing to take on outsize debt to attend university (or send their children), and how politicians justify treating higher education as an entitlement worth of massive subsidy.
While the university value proposition has become less compelling because of rising costs and a harsh economy, Y Combinator and programs like it will never come close to establishing the same type of value proposition for a simple reason: most young people who start businesses with no capital of their own and no domain expertise are not going to be successful.
You're joking, right? Y Combinator and accelerators like it are great programs for certain types of individuals, but they're hardly a threat to the higher education industrial complex.
Y Combinator has produced some great successes, but despite all the resources and access Y Combinator provides participants, Y Combinator has not discovered a recipe for startup success. The numbers make this very clear[1][2].
More importantly, there is only so much room to scale accelerator programs. Few companies emerge from these programs with cash flow sufficient to fund their operations, so they depend on the availability of angel and venture capital to support their portfolio companies. If you significantly expand the Y Combinators of the world, demand for capital would soon exceed supply, so you'd see a dramatic increase in the percentage of portfolio companies that die, and the speed with which they die.
[1] http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-portfolio-stats
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8043856