It’s past 7 p.m. in Tangen Hall, the fifth pitch of the night is rolling, and the room practically vibrates with ambition. Here, students aren’t just reciting case answers, they’re creating: apps made for real-world pain points, brands built from late-night brainstorming, and Shopify stores run from dorm rooms. This isn’t the Penn your parents told you about.
We’re in the middle of a revolution. The story is in the numbers. Applications to consulting and investment banking from Ivy League schools have dropped off a cliff in 2025. The number of Ivy and elite college graduates founding venture-backed startups has never been greater. PitchBook’s 2025 rankings show that top schools are producing startup founders at rates two to three times higher than a decade ago: a record surge in campus entrepreneurship.
For Generation Z, the math is simple: Ownership beats obedience. Flexibility trumps status. But the entrepreneurial urge runs much deeper.
Why? Because our values are changing. Status and salary don’t impress our generation anymore: Agency, impact, and the ability to build something that feels like ours does. It’s a new era of innovation where students crave meaning over mere money. It’s why Penn’s pitch nights are packed and why the “pre-professional pipeline” is springing leaks.
We know the odds for breakout success are brutal, but if we’re smart enough to get into Penn, why settle for grinding spreadsheets in a glass tower when we can bet on ourselves? While this path isn’t for everyone, and that’s more than okay, it’s clear that more and more students are daring to choose it. The entrepreneurial route at Penn isn’t just an outlier anymore; it’s becoming part of the mainstream.
Maybe the next billion-dollar idea isn’t born in a corner office, but over cold pizza in a campus lounge. It feels like every time I scroll through LinkedIn these days, I see more students posting about launching their own startups than landing new jobs. Startup announcements have become the new job offers. I remember seeing a post from an engineering student claiming they learned 10x more launching their own startup than they ever did at a software engineering internship in Big Tech, and the comment section is full of people echoing that same sentiment. Testaments from those who dropped out of school say the real key was ditching any backup plan: Having no Plan B meant they had no choice but to make Plan A work. And then there are the students grinding away in San Francisco’s hacker houses and crappy motels. I have heard from some founders that living in less than adequate housing actually pushed them because it gave them a constant reminder of what’s at stake if they fail. These are some of the nation’s brightest minds, diving into this lifestyle willingly for the chance to make it big. They realize the benefits of taking more risk in their 20s for an outsized return in the long term. A report from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor highlights that people who take entrepreneurial risks earlier in life enjoy higher average earnings and greater professional satisfaction compared to those who delay or avoid risk-taking entirely.
This is not to say that the only way to build something great requires abandoning your whole life for it. There is so much time left in the day for someone to build something great, and I believe that the ordinary can do the extraordinary. We should not limit ourselves to expectations built from past decades. We should build upon all the future chances of opportunities that are open today. With AI comes a reminder that there is more to life than a paycheck. There is a great freedom that comes from testing one's own boundaries and failing fast. With great failure comes great success.
I recently met a student who spent a year living as a monk in Thailand and then sold his startup for a high six figures before entering Penn as a first year. He told me that if your heart is in it, it will never fail. As aspirational as that sounded, I initially found it hard to believe how one can say that a startup or business can surely succeed when statistically the odds remind us of the opposite. 20% of new businesses fail within their first year, and about 90% of startups ultimately fail. The important distinction he made is that your heart needs to be “in it.” You need to be so obsessed that you cannot even bear the thought of failure. That’s exactly why so many bold students are willing to risk their prestigious degrees and those high corporate paychecks for a real shot at making it big.
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So next time you catch yourself cringing at someone’s new podcast, business, or content launch, remember that greatness almost always starts as an idea that feels awkward or misunderstood. Every vision worth building faces doubt before admiration, especially today, when it is much easier to be doubted than praised. But remember, the world’s greatest companies, creators, and leaders were all called ‘cringe’ before they were called innovators. There is no such thing as the perfect time, and no one will be waiting to tell you when to start something of your own. If something inside you says you could make a difference, trust it: The best time to begin is always now.
MAHEE PATEL is a College sophomore studying Economics from Iselin, N.J. Her email is mtpatel@sas.upenn.edu.
