Changing its approach to student founders, Y Combinator has unveiled Early Decision, a new track that allows students to secure funding and a guaranteed spot in a future YC batch, without having to abandon their studies.
Unlike the long-standing culture in Silicon Valley that celebrates dropping out, this initiative creates room for students who want to finish school first before diving fully into company building. Once accepted, they receive immediate funding but only join YC after completing their degree.
Explaining the idea, Jared Friedman, YC managing partner said: “It’s designed for graduating seniors who want to do a startup but also want to finish school first.”
He added that the programme emerged from student feedback: “Between AI Startup School last summer and the more than 20 university trips we’ve done over the past year, we’ve had a lot of opportunities to do that. One of YC’s most common pieces of advice is to ‘talk to your users,’ and we follow it ourselves.”
Aside from high costs of studies, students today doubt the value of degrees, especially with competing opportunities like internships with Big Tech or fellowships that encourage early exits from academia. YC’s new track is designed to increase its pool of applicants by removing the pressure to make an all-or-nothing decision between school and entrepreneurship.
This changes the dropout-driven legacy once embodied by founders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, figures who famously left school to chase billion-dollar ideas.
Even within Y Combinator, companies like Dropbox, Reddit, Stripe, and Instacart had young founders who left college to participate; Early Decision seeks to change that.
A recent case shows how it works. Spur, a startup developing AI-powered quality-assurance testing tools, joined YC in the summer of 2024 after its founders, Sneha Sivakumar and Anushka Nijhawan, applied through Early Decision the year before while still in school. They graduated, joined the batch, and quickly went on to raise $4.5 million.
With this track, YC is ensuring that founders will not have to choose between academia and entrepreneurship, they can pursue both.
The accelerator also secures early access to student talent in an increasingly competitive funding environment, where programmes such as the Thiel Fellowship, Neo Scholars, and Founders Inc are vying for the same pipeline of goal-driven young builders.
