From the link:
>In other words, what we might have perceived as a difference in education quality was really the product of systematic differences in how the considered populations were put together. The groups we considered had a hidden non-random distribution. This is selection bias.
As you just stated, entrepreneur-y students self-select into Olin. The fact the school produces entrepreneurs doesn't have anything to do with the teachers, the curriculum, or the chemicals Olin puts in the drinking water. It's the non-random distribution of students.
Does Olin produce / graduate founders at ~5 times the rate of Stanford? Yes - no bias.
Is the effect size due to self-selection? Likely at least partially.
What is more likely, is the school does an excellent job affording students the opportunity found successful, venture-backed companies. Similar to the way the Physics professors and curriculum afford physicists the ability to be good at physics.
The fact the article highlights this opportunity for other entrepreneurially minded people, who may want to attend in the future, is exactly what the data in the article is supposed to do.
If you looked only at the subset of Stanford students with similar interests and backgrounds to Olin’s student population, you’d probably end up with a similar distribution of outcomes.
I don't think there's nearly enough information to determine that confidently, but we're simply talking about beliefs at this point.
This is not dissimilar from the old boy network that makes Washington and Lee the single university which most increases your median earning potential. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Magazine%27s_Lis... for where I got that from.)
Well, the best students self-select into Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, etc.
"I specifically went to Olin because I thought it would best help me become a successful entrepreneur"
choose one
arcticfox is probably referring to the title conclusion "Olin College Produces Founders at Five Time the Rate of Stanford" not being the result of selection bias during the analysis phase (as implied for example in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15184748).
The conclusion "Olin College is more effective at turning people into founders than Stanford" is indeed a far more speculative conclusion due to self-selection.
What you have experienced is confirmation-bias. Whereby, you have interpreted evidence to reaffirm your own beliefs. In this case, your belief is, “Olin College cannot be better than MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and the like because those schools are the best.”
When you allow yourself to succumb to confirmation bias, you close yourself off to the possibility there is a school which prepares students for an entrepreneurial life. Please do not close others off to the same possibility.
Right now most startups are tech heavy. If you have a school with exclusively engineering and technology majors, you're much more likely to have a higher startup rate then a full university.
As an alum, I specifically went to Olin because I thought it would best help me become a successful entrepreneur. Many people do.
So my priors are that Olin is likely to do this at a higher rate (since Stanford / MIT etc. have entire swathes of the school not interested in entrepreneurship at all); this evidence makes that seem overwhelmingly likely now.
Consider evaluating all the departments of a school and finding out that one of the smallest turns out the highest percentage of high-energy physicists. Selection bias? Nope, just the high-energy physics department.