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The AI gold rush is driving students to pause college for startup bets
By Thibault Spirlet You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email. A Stanford professor says AI is driving students to pause their degrees and chase startups like a modern gold rush. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images 2026-04-28T12:08:42.373Z A Stanford professor said the AI boom is encouraging students to pause their studies to pursue early-stage startups. Nicholas Bloom said the trend echoes the early 2000s as more undergrads join AI ventures. Students see startups as reversible bets, not career detours, he added. "It feels like a return to the early 2000s." That's how Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University, described what he sees as a growing trend on campus: students pausing their degrees to join early-stage AI startups.Bloom said he knows at least five students who have put their studies on hold to chase opportunities in artificial intelligence — a move that echoes the dot-com boom at the turn of the century, when young talent flooded into internet startups.While this is just a handful of students among the couple of hundred that he teaches, this movement is significantly higher than in prior years, he said. Stanford University told Business Insider it does not track the reasons students take leaves of absence, so it has no data on this trend."This dropout to startups was not something I had seen before," Bloom said. "AI is so new that undergrads can potentially be at the cutting edge of this, and the valuations are so high that it's worth it for them to pause even for an early-stage idea." Still, students do have the option to return to their studies if it doesn't work out."It feels for students like pulling on a lottery ticket — if you win, it's amazing, and if you lose, you've spent two years in startup life and can return to Stanford."'People are really worried about their jobs'The trend reflects a broader shift in how students are thinking about careers in the age of AI.Rather than following conventional paths through internships, college, and corporate roles, some are skipping ahead to build or join AI startups — sometimes pausing or dropping out of school entirely, as Business Insider previously reported.Part of the shift may be driven by growing uncertainty around entry-level work. AI and layoffs across tech and corporate sectors are already prompting students to switch majors and reshaping the kinds of jobs new graduates typically take, with compani...
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