"[It's] nearly impossible to study using non-invasive measures in humans. However, there is a paper on effects of exercise in humans where the authors talk about an in vivo correlate of adult neurogenesis:
Pereira AC, Huddleston DE, Brickman AM, Sosunov AA, Hen R, McKhann GM, Sloan R, Gage FH, Brown TR & Small SA (2007). Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104, 5638–5643.
This is pretty old, so maybe there would be more recent studies to be found. However, thinking about the relevance of using rodents to study human brain (because we are of course interested in the human brain, not the rat brain), there is close resemblance in terms of structure and function. Please see the following papers for details:
Clark RE, Squire LR. 2013. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 110 Suppl 2(Suppl 2):10365-70
Bergmann E, Zur G, Bershadsky G, Kahn I. 2016. Cereb Cortex. 26(12):4497-4512."
Are project Gutenberg books still relevant? I am not someone who knows a lot about technology. Therefore, I am not sure how to gauge the relevance of these 50 to 100-year old texts.
To say, “it is absolutely selection bias,” infers the professors and curriculum of the school had no effect on the ability of students to become successful, venture-backed entrepreneurs. Which you cannot conclude given the data.
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.
I never wrote that MIT, Harvard, Stanford and Yale are better than Olin. What I did say was that you should compare apples to apples, compare average start up rate for majors at Olin to the same majors at MIT, Yale, Stanford and Harvard.
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.
That is like saying, people who self-select to go to the physics department go there only to be with other physics students are and that it, "doesn't have anything to do with the teachers, [or] the curriculum."
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.
Stanford also does a good job of helping interested students with those things. It’s just larger and more diverse, and also includes students who want to be judges, literary critics, historians, medical doctors, mathematicians, journalists, school teachers, etc.
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.
There's a qualitative difference, though, in being in a place that is full of mostly people who don't share your interests/goals of founding startups (Stanford) versus those who do (Olin). E.g. there's more gay people in Dallas than in San Francisco (owing to population size differences), but the latter is still a much better place to be gay because of the concentration.
