Give student founders time

Sometimes universities just need to leave enterprising students alone.

That sounds harsh, because a university often gives someone the knowledge, environment and access to people that allow them to start creating anything at all.

A student learns to code, to understand medicine, biology or engineering. They join accelerators, find a team and build their first projects.

At some point, the system gets exactly the person it supposedly wanted: independent, proactive and capable of creating things without instructions from above.

They find a real problem, put together a team, launch a product, get their first users, and decide to spend the next few years building something truly big. People with big ambitions struggle to settle for something small.

And then the university says:

“Great. Now do everything exactly like everyone else.”

The same compulsory assignments. The same deadlines. The same attendance requirements. The same number of hours.

It doesn't matter that one student goes home to watch a series after class while another goes to build a company. To the system, they are the same.

In my opinion, this is where universities make a serious mistake.

We talk a lot about giving students opportunities: accelerators, hackathons, startup schools, competitions and innovation centres.

But when someone actually uses those opportunities and starts building something serious, they still have to squeeze it between lectures, assessments and exams.

Harvard offers an interesting pair of examples. Bill Gates worked on Altair BASIC during his student years, and Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from Harvard. Both eventually left without graduating. Of course, that doesn't mean the lesson is to drop out.

We can ask a different question instead: what if sometimes a university should remove a few obligations, rather than add another opportunity?

Imagine a separate track for students who have already shown that they can work independently.

You have a real project, users, research, a technological development or a company. Some of the standard workload can be replaced by that work.

Not exemption from education. An opportunity to obtain part of that education through a real project.

Because that is learning too. Sometimes a pretty brutal kind. Actually, often, not just sometimes.

Users don't care about your GPA. Clients don't care how beautiful your presentation was.

The product either solves a problem or it doesn't. The team either works or falls apart. You either run out of money or learn how to earn it.

I understand the main counterargument: if students get more freedom, many may simply waste the time.

Maybe. Although I'd argue that those already wasting their time won't suddenly start wasting much more of it. :)

I'm not talking about cancelling classes for everyone. I'm talking about recognising people who have already demonstrated, through action, that they can use freedom productively.

The economics are asymmetric too.

Suppose a university gives dozens of those students more time and most of their projects fail. If even one builds a major technology company, creates hundreds of jobs, exports a product and pays taxes, the potential benefit of that exception could be vastly greater than the cost of the freedom granted.

That is why it seems strange to optimise a university entirely around the average student.

The average student may genuinely need structure. But someone who has already learned how to build independently sometimes needs something completely different: for people to stop getting in the way.

The university has already done its work. It gave them knowledge, an environment and the ability to build.

Perhaps the most useful thing it can do now is give them time to build something great.