Agreed. A university is a place for learning how to ask questions, and it runs on curiosity. Starting a company is just a means. When there is something you are curious about, or a problem you want solved, a startup is one of the ways to go after it.
I went to university in Korea and I'm on my third startup. I watched startup clubs, government grant programs, and university-run programs all operate with the stated goal of encouraging entrepreneurship. The means became the end: the optimal strategy turned into presenting whatever scores well with the review panel. People took the money and technically started companies, but without underlying curiosity they couldn't carry it for long.
Teaching people how to build things, and the experience of actually making something from nothing, is special. But I also saw students who had no idea such possibilities existed, unknown unknowns, get gripped by the idea that they had to make something, and end up building only software, and within software, only dating apps.
> Agreed. A university is a place for learning how to ask questions, and it runs on curiosity.
This is a rather oversimplified, old-fashioned take on the purpose of university.
University in the 21st century is surely a straightforward high-stakes gamble, particularly in the UK and the USA: can I risk taking three or four years away from the job market, and go into life-changing, multi-decade debt, in order to gain qualifications that give me access to higher-than-minimum-wage jobs that I can get no other way, and will there still be enough of the kind of jobs mentioned in the prospectus at the end of it?
It is something that in most cases you can't afford to do and you also can't afford not to do.
Fair point. I don't know the cost of higher education in the US or the UK well.
In Korea tuition itself is much cheaper, scholarships cover a much wider range of students, and the interest on student loans is noticeably lower. That may be why there is a bit more room to breathe.
That said, I agree that to survive in the Korean job market you also need concrete skills. I just think that for those skills to be learned deeply and then developed further, you need the ability to question and to doubt.
I went to university in Korea and I'm on my third startup. I watched startup clubs, government grant programs, and university-run programs all operate with the stated goal of encouraging entrepreneurship. The means became the end: the optimal strategy turned into presenting whatever scores well with the review panel. People took the money and technically started companies, but without underlying curiosity they couldn't carry it for long.
Teaching people how to build things, and the experience of actually making something from nothing, is special. But I also saw students who had no idea such possibilities existed, unknown unknowns, get gripped by the idea that they had to make something, and end up building only software, and within software, only dating apps.