For decades, Silicon Valley has celebrated the college dropout. Founders like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg left school early to build companies and became billionaires. This idea became more formal with programs like the Thiel Fellowship, which pays promising students one hundred thousand dollars to leave college and start companies.
For many years, the famous accelerator Y Combinator also supported this culture. While it never officially required 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 young and left school to build their companies.
Now Y Combinator is changing that story. The accelerator has introduced a new application track called Early Decision. It is designed for students who want to start companies but do not want to drop out. This program lets them apply while still in school, get accepted and funded immediately, and then defer their Y Combinator participation until after they graduate. For example, a student applying in the fall of 2025 could graduate in the spring of 2026 and then join Y Combinator’s summer 2026 batch.
According to Y Combinator managing partner Jared Friedman, the program is for graduating seniors who want to do a startup but also want to finish school first. He said the idea came from conversations with students. Between AI Startup School last summer and more than twenty university trips over the past year, the team had many chances to talk to students. Friedman noted that one of Y Combinator’s most common pieces of advice is to talk to your users, and they follow that advice themselves.
In Silicon Valley culture, dropping out has been almost a rite of passage for aspiring founders. Programs like the Thiel Fellowship have turned it into a movement. This is why Y Combinator’s announcement is a significant break from the idea that leaving school early is the best or only path to startup success. The timing is also important, as more young people are questioning both the cost of college and the trade-offs of staying in school.
The new program also shows a growing maturity in how Y Combinator thinks about long-term founder outcomes. The accelerator has always attracted college-aged builders. Founders of companies like Loom, Instacart, Rappi, and Brex were in their teens or early twenties when they joined. But the decision to drop out was often implied: do the program now or miss the opportunity.
Early Decision removes that pressure. It offers a middle ground between finishing school and pursuing entrepreneurship. This move could expand Y Combinator’s applicant pool to include more cautious and deliberate student founders who are committed to startup life but unwilling to sacrifice their education.
Y Combinator highlights Sneha Sivakumar and Anushka Nijhawan, the co-founders of Spur, as a success story from this approach. Spur builds AI-powered quality-assurance testing tools. The duo applied through Early Decision in the fall of 2023 while still in school. They graduated in May 2024, joined the Summer 2024 Y Combinator batch, and have since raised four and a half million dollars.
The program is open to both graduating students and those earlier in their academic journey. It is a bet that some of the best founders of the next decade will not need to choose between college and startups. They will be able to do both.
This move also helps Y Combinator secure talent early in an increasingly competitive accelerator and seed funding landscape. It gives students an option that competes with other programs like the Thiel Fellowship, Neo Scholars, Founders Inc, as well as Big Tech internships and graduate school pipelines.