The global pandemic has halted travel, shunted schools online and shut down many cities, but the future of college-town America is an area of deep concern for the startup world.
College towns have done exceedingly well with the rise of the knowledge economy and concentrating students and talent in dense social webs. That confluence of ideas and skill fueled the rise of a whole set of startup clusters outside major geos like the Bay Area, but with COVID-19 bearing down on these ecosystems and many tech workers considering remote work, what does the future look like for these cradles of innovation?
We have three angles on this topic from the Equity podcast crew:
- Danny Crichton sees the death of college towns, and looks at whether remote tools can substitute for in-person connections when building a startup.
- Natasha Mascarenhas believes connecting with other students is critical for developing one’s sense of self, and the decline of colleges will negatively impact students and their ability to trial and error their way to their first job.
- Alex Wilhelm looks at whether residential colleges are about to be disrupted — or whether tradition will prevail. His is (surprise!) a more sanguine look at the future of college towns.
Startup hubs are going to disintegrate as college towns are decimated by coronavirus
Danny Crichton: One of the few urban success stories outside the big global cities like New York, Tokyo, Paris and London has been a small set of cities that have used a mix of their proximity to power (state capitals), knowledge (universities) and finance (local big companies) to build innovative economies. That includes places like Austin, Columbus, Chattanooga, Ann Arbor, Urbana, Denver, Atlanta and Minneapolis, among many others.
Over the past two decades, there was an almost magical economic alchemy underway in these locales. Universities attracted large numbers of bright and ambitious students, capitals and state government offices offered a financial base to the regional economy and local big companies offered the jobs and stability that allow innovation to flourish.
All that has disappeared, leading to some critics, like Noah Smith, to ask whether “Coronavirus Will End the Golden Age for College Towns”?
Maybe the success of these communities was a tiny blip on the road to work-from-anywhere remote neighborhoods. Maybe innovation, ideation, creation and building will all move natively online. Maybe we never needed these cities to launch startups in the first place, and they were really just crutches that are better discarded.
I don’t buy it.
Startups (and innovation more broadly) are constellations of collaboration, both between those directly engaged with the work as well as those who might only be sounding boards for the people building these companies. Founders absorb hundreds of ideas, pieces of advice and memories of experience in building their dreams, and while much of that information may be superfluous in retrospect, it’s the one idea in a thousand that can make all the difference in the world when you are creating on the frontier.
Big startup hubs like San Francisco and New York City, as well as burgeoning ones like the towns I mentioned earlier, are venues for ricocheting interesting ideas between people. Coffee meetings, warmups at SoulCycles, meetups, networking dinners, casual encounters — all of these are places where spontaneity of communication can help founders find and iterate on ideas.
If you have a plan, a set of tasks and a reasonable sense of the objectives of your organization, remote work is easy today. You can communicate with others via Slack and Google Meet and you can save updates on your progress in a system of record like Jira or GitLab or Salesforce. The actual work itself is relatively disconnected from the work of others.
When it comes to creating though, distance is still pretty challenging. A number of new companies have raised funding in recent weeks, like Miro, to offer teams a way to whiteboard ideas and get feedback. That’s a step forward, but these products are a poor substitute for the energy and vibrancy of discussions you can have in places with dense sets of talented people all working on similar projects.
The global pandemic is indeed going to wipe out college towns. Foreign students who pay a huge percentage of the tuition at these schools aren’t coming back for a while, state budget revenues are going to be decimated and if classes aren’t even in-person, students aren’t going to show up in the first place. That’s damaging immediately, but the long-term effects will be even worse: a whole generation of startups that might otherwise get formed will simply evaporate in the morass of this tragedy.
Maybe we will find remote ways to seek out and build relationships with new co-founders at scale, and maybe we will find new ways to brainstorm startup ideas and lock in new product launches as well, all online. Maybe. But ultimately, startups are a very human enterprise, and a product of all sorts of micro-interactions. It isn’t random that talent concentrates in a handful of places, much as it isn’t random that most startups are launched in just a handful of geographies (which happen to be the same cities where talent concentrates!).
There is an urban network effect, and the infrastructure for remote work hasn’t found a substitute for it. The global pandemic isn’t just going to harm our college towns — but harm the innovative “rise of the rest” that has been a positive feature of the last decade.
Loss of campus culture will stunt entrepreneurs’ personal growth and development
Natasha Mascarenhas: College campuses have been hailed as breeding grounds for billion-dollar ideas — and as places some abandon to actually pursue their ideas. Now that campuses are closing, the optimistic take is that we’ll just see the dorm-room drop-out phenomenon grow in size.
The more realistic take, however, is that only a select few students will follow that fortuitous path, due to a mix of privilege, luck and sheer intelligence. Indefinite college closures hurt the majority of students who depend on this four-year stretch to start figuring out their lives. Remote learning will take care of comprehension and test-taking, but what about the serendipity that being on a college campus provides?
When I was studying at Boston University, some of my most pivotal moments were late nights in the school newsroom. I only got into business journalism because the first assignment I ever got as a first-year student was a business story about Delta Airlines’ sustainability efforts (the story aged as well as you might think). I stuck with business from that day onward because the business section editor sat with me for three hours after I submitted the story to go over edits and structure. Looking back, that moment has defined my career path right up until now.
The story and lesson looks different depending on who you ask, but I’d argue that the false reality of college, a place where you and your friends “play adult,” serves as a sandbox to prepare you for becoming an adult. A campus could be where you learn that life is bigger than your suburban hometown; it could be the first place you meet someone who grew up overseas. For many, it will be the first time they realize that they aren’t the smartest person in the room.
It’s pretty clear that startups reward people who approach life like an experiment versus a ladder. College, in my opinion, gives you the freedom and safety to experiment in the first place.
Tradition and peer groups will keep colleges and their nearby towns vibrant with ideas
Alex Wilhelm: I live in a college town today. Providence, Rhode Island is home to a number of well-known schools, including Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, whose alums include Airbnb founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia. I live close enough to campuses that I’m enmeshed in university life to some degree and get to attend concerts and other events at these schools.
That proximity may make me myopic to some extent, but being so close to the modern university-city union also provides some useful perspective. Based on my conversations with recently graduated founders from area schools, I find the doom-and-gloom take on college towns to be overly dramatic twaddle put forth by Twitter pundits who have already aged out of youth and the ability to compromise (sorry, Danny).
These folks are taking a clear trend (rising remote education) and an immediate accelerant (COVID-19-related disruptions) and drawing a line that does far more than connect the dots. Chat with startup folks in university towns (I’ve also done this where I went to school in Chicago) and you’ll often find that they are founding companies with peers they met at school, the sort of connection that simply does not form as tightly over the internet as they do in person.
Fine, you might say, but if students stop attending school, what good is that argument?
Here’s the thing: Students aren’t about to stop attending college in person, mostly. Yes, more students will take college online, but not most, at least not for another decade or more. We can tell that’s going to be the case for a few reasons, but I’ll restrict myself to just one: tradition.
Parents and students have, for decades, showed a willingness to go deeply into debt to send their children to traditional, residential colleges. And they did so when remote learning was increasingly an option and many educational resources were free on the internet.
The family tendency toward in-person college won’t end anytime soon. Throw in institutional momentum regarding what sorts of degrees “count” and it’s hard to worry that campuses are in danger of going empty.
And there are some good reasons for keeping campuses stocked with students that go beyond tradition. My parents had pretty tough college expectations for myself and my siblings. But one day my dad told me something that I haven’t forgotten: They didn’t want to send us to good schools because the teaching would be that much better; you can get all that from a library. My parents wanted us to go to respected schools, he said, because we’d have a killer peer group.
Business schools, an extreme example of the people-over-teachers argument in schooling, won’t change. Universities will hold back the remote-and-online college tide for similar reasons. Given that, university towns will retain their pull, and thus continue to foster and sustain startup ecosystems because they’ll attract ambitious kids looking to shake up the world.
This point is exacerbated when we consider hard-science graduate programs that power companies in a number of ecosystems and not just the traditional undergraduate experience.
It has been cool to shit on college on Twitter for a while now. But check the resumes of the companies that those squawking VCs back and you’ll see the real story.
