Survey Insights

Our survey of Stanford undergraduates provided us with staggering results from 588 respondents. The make-up of respondents were as follows:

In response to the question, "Do you consider yourself entrepreneurial?" there was a clear divide between engineers and non-engineers. There were more engineers who considered themselves to be entrepreneurial than those who are studying humanities and sciences (46% versus 23%).

The follow-up question for those who considered themselves entrepreneurial was, "How did you get interested in entrepreneurship?" in which respondents were fairly evenly split among the three choices: "I always knew I wanted to start a company, and I believed Stanford was the best place to pursue my start-up goals."; "I liked the idea of starting a company, but without Stanford, I probably wouldn't have pursued entrepreneurship."; and "I never considered starting my own company before coming to Stanford, but the Stanford/Silicon Valley environment has pushed me in a new direction." The split was 36%, 32%, and 31%, respectively. It gets interesting when the results are broken down by class year. 52% of freshmen entrepreneurs came in thinking they wanted to start a company, however, by junior year, 50% of entrepreneurs say they had never considered starting their own company before coming to Stanford, but the Stanford/Silicon Valley environment has pushed them in a new direction. This could be attributed to either Stanford having an effect on student's decisions to enter entrepreneurship or the timing and state of the current industry, especially since the start-up environment is extremely hot right now.

We also asked student entrepreneurs the question, "What resources at Stanford were most helpful in preparing you for entrepreneurship?" in which 77% of respondents cited "other entrepreneurially-minded students." Stanford is an environment where many of its students are open to working with others on ideas that will change the world. Not only that, but the caliber of students at Stanford is one of the highest in the country. It makes sense that entrepreneurs regard their peers as one of the most helpful resources in starting a company. Another interesting data point is the increase in importance of class projects in its role in helping entrepreneurs. There was a huge jump from freshmen to senior respondents, with 26% of freshmen saying the class projects were helpful compared to the 69% of seniors. This can simply be the result of freshmen not having taken many class projects, but even as upperclassmen have taken more project classes, they are finding huge value in them--being able to apply their skills to projects and meet potential collaborators for future endeavors.



Next, came the question of "Do you think a university should provide a broad classical education or a focused vocational education? Most students felt that a broad, classic liberal arts education was best (76% versus 24%). This also held true within the different schools, with the difference most notably between humanities and sciences majors and engineering majors (83% for a classic education for the former, 64% for the latter).

In an attempt to see if Stanford undergraduates think that the humanities are a dying breed due to an entrepreneurial focus at Stanford, we asked the question, "Do you think Stanford focuses too heavily on entrepreneurship at the expense of a classical liberal arts education?" Surprisingly, most undergraduates don't think it's a problem. A whopping 82% of student respondents said that Stanford doesn't focus too heavily on entrepreneurship at the cost of a broader education. This has huge implications since the Stanford faculty through the Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford believe that there has been a loss of the humanities and are trying to reform the undergraduate curriculum to save the liberal arts. It will be interesting to see what Stanford does with this when students don't feel that it is a problem.

The last two questions focused on the Thiel Fellowship. We first asked, "If you had a great idea and were offered $100,000 to work on it full-time for two years, would you do it?" We followed it with the same question, but with the setting being the time after graduating from high school (thereby forgoing college). Interestingly, 60% of the respondents said they would take the offer while in college and of those that said would take it in college, only 35% of them would take it right out of high school, showing that most of these students do see value in a college education--or at least they are more comfortable with the tradition progression of high school to college. Of the 40% that would reject the offer in college, however, 13% of them actually said that they would take if they were given the offer after graduating from high school. One possible conclusion to extract from this data is that students do see a value in entering college right after high school, but once in college, it is more feasible to stop out and to pursue a venture (possibly because of the low-risk involved due to Stanford's lenient leave-of-absence policy). Another interesting data point was that of those who considered themselves entrepreneurial, 71% said they would take the Thiel Fellowship while in college, but only 27% of them would take it right out of high school. And of those who did not consider themselves entrepreneurial, 55% would take it in college and 26% of them out of high school.

Back to the top ↑