Utsav Gupta is a Master of Liberal Arts candidate at Stanford researching human purpose in the age of AI and co-lead of the Stanford HAI Cognitive Security Task Force. He is founder and co-CEO of Filarion, building AI and spatial-computing systems across education, law and design, and serves as Commissioner on the Palo Alto Utilities Advisory Commission.

Theo Baker’s ’26 recent Atlantic piece describes a Stanford many of us know the contours of, even if we never get invited in: a “Stanford inside Stanford,” where venture capitalists pursue 18- and 19-year-olds with money, mentorship and invitations, trying to convert promise into profit. Baker quotes Steve Blank’s line that “Stanford is an incubator with dorms,” and writes about students being offered “pre-idea funding” before they even have a company in mind.

“Pre-idea funding” is money for who you might become, paid before you have become anyone. That can be a trade worth making. Students should build things, take risks and pursue ideas that sound unreasonable to everyone else. But what worries me is not the student who drops out because a project has become the honest center of their life. It is the student who drops out because the adult world has made staying feel like falling behind.

At Stanford, the dropout story is often presented as courage. Why sit in lecture when you could be changing the world? Why finish a paper when an investor wants to talk? Why waste time being a student when someone is already treating you like a founder?

But sometimes the truly countercultural move at Stanford is staying.

College should not have to defend itself only in the language of return on investment. Stanford itself says that going to college is not just about acquiring the ability to make a living, but about exploring what makes living worthwhile. About 98 percent of eligible undergraduates live on campus. The residential experience is a huge part of what makes Stanford special. It is not a small thing to walk away from.

College is a one-time experience. That may sound sentimental. But freshman year does not repeat. Neither does the formation of dorm friendships, the class you take for no strategic reason, the conversation that begins at 1 a.m. and somehow changes how you view yourself. These are not distractions from life. At your age, they are life.

Research backs up what many students already know intuitively: the value of college is not only about the degree. Gallup and Purdue found that graduates who had supportive professors, mentors, extracurricular involvement and long-term projects were more likely to be engaged at work and thriving later in life. The ordinary parts of college — office hours, clubs, seminars and friendships — are not soft extras. They are among the things that make college matter.

That is why the dropout pitch makes me uneasy. It reminds me, imperfectly, of the old market for credit cards on college campuses. Congress recognized that adults with products to sell could overwhelm young people with inducements before the costs were fully understood. Federal rules now bar issuers from inducing students with tangible items on or near campus and require them to consider a young applicant’s ability to pay.

Startups are not credit cards, and investors are not all predators. But the pattern of inducement under unequal experience should feel familiar. Adults package risk as freedom. They flatter young people with access and status. They make the offer feel like independence, even when the offer depends on inexperience.

In the startup world, while the product is not a credit line, it is an identity. Instead of a free t-shirt, it gives you a title: founder, visionary, chosen one, unlike everyone else. And once that identity sets in, ordinary student life can start to feel small. Going to class becomes embarrassing. Attending a dorm event feels childish. Spending a year reading, wandering, dating, failing and changing your mind starts to look irresponsible, even though those are exactly the things an 18-year-old should be allowed to do.

Z Fellows pays students $10,000 to stop their coursework for a week and work on a startup. Neo Residency grants college students $40,000 to take a semester off. Y Combinator is a more complicated case: its current Early Decision program is explicitly designed for students who want to finish school before doing YC, but its prestige has also helped make startup acceleration feel like a rival credential to college itself. The Thiel Fellowship offers $250,000 to young people who want to build instead of sit in a classroom, and it requires selected fellows to drop out in order to accept. Some of these programs may be valuable. Some students genuinely want them. But we should still ask when mentorship becomes marketing and when opportunity becomes pressure.

A venture capitalist can place many bets. A freshman only gets one freshman year. Harvard Business School has reported that as many as 75 percent of venture-backed companies never return cash to investors. Teenagers should not be priced as cheap options.

Ambition is yours. Outsourced ambition is theirs. There is a difference between leaving because you cannot imagine doing anything else and leaving because someone richer and older than you has made college feel like a waste of your talent.

If you really want to drop out, the decision should come from you. It should survive the disappearance of the dinner invitations, the investor attention, the borrowed prestige and the flattering idea that you are too extraordinary for school. It should be self-motivated, not socially manufactured.

Stanford should be a place where students can start companies. It should also be a place where you can learn who you are. We should be allowed to be curious without being immediately monetized, uncertain without being dismissed, young without being accelerated into someone else’s business model.

Drop out if you must. Drop out if the work is worth it. Drop out if you understand the tradeoff and would still choose it.

But do not drop out because an adult wants you to. Do not drop out because someone has decided your youth is undervalued. Do not let people who have already lived their youth tell you to give up yours.

The classes, the dorms, the peers, the moments of a life that cannot be re-visited: that is the reward of being at Stanford. If Stanford is becoming an incubator with dorms, we should remember that the dorms are not the afterthought; they are the point.