The other day, another Dartmouth ’27 announced they were leaving, after receiving the first round of funding of venture capital for their start-up from an alum. They join at least five students from the Class of 2026 who departed after admission to Y Combinator. All of them, unsurprisingly, are building artificial intelligence business-to-business, software-as-a-service companies. I love that Dartmouth is generating entrepreneurs, and I have written in the past about the need to recognize them. However, I am critical of how some glorify leaving college and treat it as a rite of passage in building a successful business.
In the tech world, “dropping out” is a special moment. Speak to peers at Stanford University or University of California, Berkeley, and many will tell you college is merely a transitional phase — a means to an end before they eventually leave to “build” something. This drive to exit academia is fashionably rebellious, and part of a larger culture of action and urgency. In a world that moves fast, what better way to show how fast you’re moving than by leaving the prestigious university you worked tirelessly to get into?
Here’s what you need to understand about Y Combinator and many early‑stage venture capital firms: they’re known for investing first in people, and only secondarily in the product. Many of the students who drop out are brilliant. Their talent alone means that even if their startups fail tomorrow, they’ll likely be fine and succeed elsewhere. They can risk it all, but they are the exception. The investors backing them are playing a portfolio game: they only need a handful of outliers to return a fund, even if most bets quietly go to zero. Yet, at the level of individual students, the odds look very different. One study by the Harvard Business Review estimates that only about 4% of college dropouts go on to become successful startup founders, while about 62% of unicorn founders actually hold post‑graduate degrees. I don’t cite this number to discourage risk-taking, but to remind us that survivorship bias is loud, while failure is quiet.
This begs the question, what do students gain by staying at Dartmouth that is more beneficial than the siren call of resounding success, freedom and financial independence of dropping out?
So, my recommendation is this: think thrice before you drop out.
First: Is what you’re building so urgent and important that it’s your calling to go out and build it right now? Do you have such an unshakable conviction in this one idea that it cannot wait four years, or even one? If you’re an ambitious person, your answer to this is probably always going to be yes, especially because signals like investments by reputable venture capitalists and incubators drive that affirmation.
All that being said, it is worth remembering that artificial intelligence business-to-business software-as-a-service is having more than a moment. It is a crowded, trend‑driven wave in which thousands of teams are chasing similar problems with interchangeable wrappers around the same underlying models, and new “AI for XYZ-industry” startups appear every funding cycle. So the real question is not just whether your idea feels urgent to you, but whether it is so distinctive and defensible that it will still matter when the hype cycle cools and the market stops forgiving yet another “AI copilot for XYZ.”
Second: Are you leaving for the right reasons? Are you genuinely chasing a unique opportunity, or are you chasing the archetype of the dropout founder — the Zuckerberg-esque myth that has been sold to our generation? Ask yourself if you would make the same choice if nobody ever knew you had dropped out and there were no bonus points to be earned on LinkedIn, Twitter or future podcast interviews.
Third: Have you truly accounted for what you’re giving up? This isn’t about a piece of paper. It’s about the only time in your life you’ll be surrounded by some of the smartest, most curious people your age, all living in one place. What makes Dartmouth different is that many here don’t see these four years as a means to an end. The experience itself is the point.
We, as college students, are at a stage where our minds are still moldable. Immersing ourselves in such an insular environment so young is risky. There are few things more dangerous than a world run by people who understand technology more than they understand people, our problems and our societies. At Dartmouth, we are privileged to receive an education that is diverse, both inside the classroom and out across the Green. We engage with philosophers, physicists and poets — not just programmers.
That education, and the holistic experience that comes with it, is not something to give up lightly. Startups, funding cycles and hot AI trends will come and go; four years living and growing alongside a few thousand absurdly overqualified 20-year‑olds will not. Before you leave, be sure you’re not just chasing a trend, but trading up for something genuinely greater. Think thrice. The world will wait. This won’t.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
