Looks like it's a special opportunity for students to interview early and not excluding non-students from interviewing through the normal process. Maybe they are concerned the interviews may be overrun with professional founders and they only have 1 day?

Maybe an end-around? Here are some Harvard summer courses... https://courses.dce.harvard.edu/?srcdb=202403&summer_school=.... (a long time ago now, I landed a job this way because I said I was "studying at Harvard")

College outreach has been part of YC's recruiting efforts for years. It doesn't mean others are excluded. Certainly everyone who wants to should apply for Startup School!

Would be of great service if YC were more upfront about its biases to applicants. The narrative that YC is an accessible path for anyone seems to contradict the actions taken.

Where is the outreach to those outside of elite academic and professional circles?

Everyone has biases. They don't have to enumerate them at all times. What do you actually want?

For YC/HN to peddle fewer platitudes, euphemisms, and equivocations.

At what point does preservation of this hallucinated wealth game become forced conservation of history and get in the way of the “freedom” part?

Why are we socially trained to accept “people say Musk is rich so it must be true?”

It’s all a socialized hallucination backed by government force. It’s kind of a huge joke.

Let’s just get drunk and shoot pistols at the workers feet. At least it’s honest.

> Why are we socially trained to accept “people say Musk is rich so it must be true?”

We're not socially trained for this. People don't think it's true because people say it. They think it's true because he owns a large stake in a lot of extremely valuable companies.

Owns is a socialized concept. It’s not immutable physics

We learn what it means as far as ground truth from socialization

Okay, but "rich" isn't, if you've accepted people can own things.

Not killing people is a socialised concept. I don't think this banale-fact-dressed-up-as-criticism of "is a social construct" is worth much. And if it is, it's also a social construct, as are the words used to communicate it. So should we then ignore it?

People can own things != minority of people should own all the things. Gradients, ranges, distributions, not binary.

If it’s so banal it would have no influence but you seem to accept the underlying; “banal” facts have power and social concepts are mutable. So you push back with empty rhetoric, over generalizing others to avoid the powerful fact socialized society is hallucination.

I never criticized “social concepts” either. I criticized our current social concept. Others can be propagated. Your banal attempt to generalize specifics is a lame rhetorical approach where you both accept socialized society as a concept but refuse to debate its specifics (that would require actual effort not just miming money/assets changed hands via paperwork).

May as well browse r/conservative as all HN is ever shipping is fealty to who we say is smart and rich but never requires them to prove it, but requires us to kneel and kiss the rings regardless, as if spoken tradition and written records are real evidence of skill and accomplishment when billions are spent reminding us these things are true.

> People can own things != minority of people should own all the things. Gradients, ranges, distributions, not binary.

You've just described capitalism, and our current situation.

They won't be honest about their biases or their response. But appreciate the callout <3

Or those of us with no degrees and decades of experience?

I'm in Boston.

Presumably because they want to work with students instead of people with decades of experience?

Students are willing to work hard for free for the 0.001% chance that they'll be the next Mark Zuckerberg.

> Students are willing to work hard for free for the 0.001%

The best startups run lean anyway. I'd argue this is the proper way to run one, as opposed to taking mountains of VC money and burning up in a year

Also won't raise as many eyebrows when they're taught how to manufacture valuations with little to no basis in reality.

Or perhaps this is ageism

Forgive me as I have little sympathy for middle aged adults calling "agism!!!" whenever an opportunity is presented to a college student that wasn't also presented to them

I mean isn’t that literally ageism? I don’t have any opinion on whether it’s acceptable or not here but come on…

There's also no rules saying middle aged adults cannot be college students. The only agist policy here is that you need to be 18 to apply, and nobody bat their eye at that.

Yes there are. A 50 year old man cannot enter Harvard college.

1 in 10 college students in the US is 40 or older

That’s not relevant - the schools in the area do not have undergraduates in their middle age.

Middle aged college students usually attend extension schools part of the university, but not part of the undergraduate college.

In any case there’s no strict limitation on being an undergraduate at say 60 (I believe Harvard Colleges oldest graduate was in their 80s), but it’s so exceptionally rare it’s ageism.

There’s no reason why one would need to be an undergraduate.

Why not?

That’s simply their rule.

Where is this rule? Even in your other reply you say there's "no strict limitation" so it's not a "rule", just a trend.

Dorm rules mainly. Like I mention in a sibling comment, given the demographics and the arbitrariness of the decision it’s effectively ageism without being explicit.

I do think you are entitled to filter for a specific age group implicitly, but it doesn't make it any less discriminatory.

Example: statistically the odds of someone graduating from college being over 30 are low. Therefore if I claim that I hire college graduates I get to also filter implicitly by age.

Then the question is: assuming an inherent bias of sample, is it desirable or undesirable to introduce a "function" that attempts some mitigation? I see the "functions" that attempt to mitigate sexism, racism but not ageism.

It feels like companies or organizations are just fine with slapping a paragraph at the end of an announcement that parrots "we are inclusive trust us" without any real adjustment and call it a day.

Why assume that they are excluded?