Y Combinator’s Early Decision Program Offers a Balanced Path for Student Founders, Combining Education and Entrepreneurship
In the tech world, the celebration of college dropouts has been a long-standing tradition. Pioneering figures such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg abandoned their education to establish companies that made them billionaires.
This ideology was subsequently codified through initiatives like the Thiel Fellowship, which awards promising students $100,000 to leave college and start businesses.
For years, renowned accelerator Y Combinator tacitly supported this culture. Although it never mandated students to drop out, many of its most successful alumni, including Dropbox’s Drew Houston, Reddit’s Steve Huffman, and Stripe’s John and Patrick Collison, joined the program while still young and opted to leave school behind to focus on their companies.
However, Y Combinator is now altering this narrative. The accelerator has introduced a new application track called Early Decision, designed for students who aspire to start companies but prefer not to drop out. The program allows them to apply while still in school, receive acceptance and funding immediately, and defer their participation in Y Combinator until after they graduate. For instance, a student applying in Fall 2025 could graduate in Spring 2026, then participate in Y Combinator’s Summer 2026 batch.
“The program is intended for graduating seniors who wish to embark on the startup journey but also want to complete their education first,” said Y Combinator managing partner Jared Friedman during the launch. Y Combinator did not respond to requests for additional comment.
In Silicon Valley, dropping out has been almost a rate of passage for aspiring founders. Programs like the Thiel Fellowship have transformed this practice into a movement (it’s worth noting that Peter Thiel himself did not drop out but earned both undergraduate and law degrees from Stanford).
Y Combinator’s announcement signifies a significant departure from this ethos, challenging the belief that leaving school early is the optimal or only path to startup success. The timing is also significant, coming at a time when more young people are questioning the cost of college and the trade-offs of staying in school.
The new program also indicates a growing maturity in Y Combinator’s approach towards long-term founder outcomes.
Over the years, Y Combinator has been a draw for college-aged builders. Founders of Loom, Instacart, Rappi, and Brex were teenagers or in their early twenties when they joined the program. However, the decision to drop out was often implicit: do the program now or risk missing the opportunity.
Early Decision removes this pressure, offering a middle ground between academic completion and chasing entrepreneurship. The move could broaden Y Combinator’s applicant pool to include more cautious, deliberate student founders who are committed to startup life but unwilling to sacrifice education to get there.
In its announcement, Y Combinator highlights Sneha Sivakumar and Anushka Nijhawan, the co-founders of Spur, as a success story from this approach. Spur develops AI-powered quality-assurance testing tools, and the duo applied to Y Combinator through Early Decision in Fall 2023 while still in school. They graduated in May 2024, joined the Summer 2024 Y Combinator batch, and have since raised $4.5 million.
Y Combinator notes that the program is open to both graduating students and those earlier in their academic journey. It’s a bet that some of the best founders of the next decade won’t need to choose between college and startups. They’ll do both.
The move also helps Y Combinator secure talent early in an increasingly competitive accelerator and seed funding landscape, providing students with an option that competes with other programs like Thiel Fellowship, Neo Scholars, Founders Inc, as well as Big Tech internships and grad school pipelines.
