> One big confounding factor could be the cost of student debt. You can't tell your student loan company to defer payments until your business gets off the ground.
But how many prospective tech start-up founders are saddled with student debt?
Granted I went to school (public university) 10 years ago, but in my experience the majority of the students in the CS program all come from the following cohorts:
* professional parents paying for school
* Students receiving massive amounts of grant money, with minimal loans needed
* Students able to get top internships/TA positions during the school year, which more than offset school cost.
I agree loan debt is a problem in general, but among the population that has produced VC-funded startups, it feels minimal.
(The actual "problem" I see is that opportunity cost of a start-up is now higher for these would-be founders because large companies pay so much.)
According to this site, 71% of graduates in 2012 had some kind of student loan debt [1].
I think it's probably more accurate to assume that the number of CS students is pretty close to that number, instead of assuming that your anecdotal remembrance from 10 years ago is universal.
I don't see why it is reasonable to treat CS students the same.
The average debt for graduates per your citation is about $30k. Two programming internships will more than offset that and very few other students can command even $10k in a summer, let alone $20k.
Well, if you don't want to use those aggregate numbers, then you are going to need numbers of your own. What percentage of CS students have paid internships? What's the average pay of those internships? That sort of thing.
But how many prospective tech start-up founders are saddled with student debt?
Granted I went to school (public university) 10 years ago, but in my experience the majority of the students in the CS program all come from the following cohorts:
* professional parents paying for school
* Students receiving massive amounts of grant money, with minimal loans needed
* Students able to get top internships/TA positions during the school year, which more than offset school cost.
I agree loan debt is a problem in general, but among the population that has produced VC-funded startups, it feels minimal.
(The actual "problem" I see is that opportunity cost of a start-up is now higher for these would-be founders because large companies pay so much.)