[ledwards]

The college encourages an entrepreneurial attitude, but is not focused explicitly on getting alumni to start companies. But you do see a lot of Olin alumni joining early startups as well as big companies. Google was the largest employer of Olin alumni in the first two years (2006-2007), mostly through the new-at-the-time APM program. A few years later, it was Microsoft. Now Pivotal is high up the list. You also see Olin alumni joining early startups that they did not found as early employees (Square, AirBnB, Adroll off the top of my head).

I have looked into controlling for major, but I would need to rework all the data from the Pitchbook report, and I don't have their primary data sources. Surely some founders from those schools come from non-technical majors. If I remove them from the denominator, I'd need to remove them from the numerator as well.

I did start looking at this though, and I don't think it would change the outcome much. At MIT, almost 90% of alumni are in science, math, engineering, and business. At Stanford, it's more than half. So that would change the difference from something like 5x to maybe 2x, and that's without removing the founders of those colleges with non-technical degrees from their list of founders. Harvard might be the more interesting one, where I suspect technical and business degrees are not a clear majority.

But given the wide margin, I don't expect this would change the order of the ranking at all, maybe just my (intentionally) clickbaity headline.

[devmunchies]

when you say "Google was the largest employer of Olin alumni" do you mean like, what, 3 to 10 people? Its too small to even compare to Stanford. Its apples to appleseeds.

I mean it sounds like a great school, kudos to the staff, but its a silly comparison.