Y Combinator launches “Early decision” for students who first want to examine, build later

For decades, Silicon Valley Valized College has the release. Founders like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg left school early to build businesses and became a billionaires.

This ethos was later institutionalized through initiatives such as Thiel Fellowship, which famously pay promising students $ 100,000 to leave college and start businesses.

For many years, the famous accelerator Y -combinator also calmly reinforced this culture. While it never explicitly required students to drop, many of its most successful alumni ended, including Dropbox’s Drew Houston, Reddits Steve Huffman, and Stripe’s John and Patrick Collison, the Young program and left school behind to build their businesses.

Now YC is changing this tale.

The accelerator has introduced a new application track called Early Decision, designed for students who want to start businesses but do not want to drop. The program allows them to apply while they are still in school are accepted and financed immediately and postpone their participation in YC until they are educated. For example, a student who applied for in the fall of 2025 could move on in the spring of 2026 and then participate in YC’s Summer 2026 batch.

“It is designed to educate seniors who want to start a start -up but also want to finish school first,” said YC Managing Partner Jared Friedman in the launch video.

Friedman added that the idea for the early decision came from conversations with students. “Between the AI ​​Start School last summer and the more than 20 university trips we have done in the past year, we have had a lot of opportunities to do so. One of YC’s most common advice is to” talk to your users “and we follow it ourselves,” he told Techcrunch via e -mail.

In the Silicon Valley culture, dropping out has almost a passage of passage for hopeful founders such as the Thiel Scholarship has made it a movement (although it is worth noting that Peter Thiel himself did not fall out, but served both bachelor and law degrees from Stanford).

That is why YC’s message is a meaningful break from the mytos that leaving school early is the optimal or only way to start -up success. The timing is also significant, which comes at a time when more young people question both the cost of college and varies by staying in school.

The new program also reflects a growing maturity in how YC is thinking of long -term founder results.

The accelerator has long been a magnet for builders of the university age. Founders of Loom, Instacart, Rappi and Brex were in their teens or early twenties when they joined the program. But the decision to drop was often implicit: Do the program now or miss the opportunity.

Early decision removes this pressure that offers an intermediate plot between academic completion and hunting entrepreneurship. The move could expand YCS applicant pool to include more cautious, conscious students who are required to start life, but unwilling to sacrifice education to get there.