Entrepreneurship Is Changing How Young People See University

"So I was off to study at Kazan University, nothing less." Maxim Gorky's memoir, published in 1923, opens with that line. The year is 1884. Gorky is just sixteen, and his name is still Alexei Peshkov.

The idea had been planted by a secondary-school pupil called N. Yevreinov. Yevreinov, who always saw Gorky with a book in his hand, believed he had "an extraordinary aptitude for science". The plan was all worked out: he would stay with Yevreinov in Kazan, finish the school syllabus over the autumn and winter, sit "a few" exams, win a state scholarship and in five years be a scientist. As Gorky wryly noted years later, it was all very simple, because Yevreinov was nineteen and had a kind heart.

He never got through the university's doors. To survive in Kazan he took whatever work he could find, and spent one winter in the basement of a bakery. During these years he met Andrei Derenkov, a grocer who owned the city's best library of banned and rare books. The real masters of Derenkov's house were students from the university, the theological academy and the veterinary institute: a noisy crowd, forever fired up by newspaper articles and freshly read books, and preoccupied with Russia's future.

When the shop's small income could not cover all the people and causes waiting for help, Derenkov opened a bakery. By his reckoning it would earn at least thirty-five per cent on every rouble turned over. Gorky became a baker's assistant. Every morning he filled a huge basket with buns and ran to the theological academy in time for the students' morning tea. The boy who could not get into university was selling bread to university students.

He wanted it so badly that he would later write that if someone had told him, "Go and study, but every Sunday we will beat you with a stick in Nikolayevskaya Square for it," he would most likely have agreed. The title of the memoir is a nod to those basements, streets and bread baskets: "My Universities".

Today's Yevreinovs

Young people today face two opposing promises. One is as straightforward as Yevreinov's: a good university, a good degree, a secure life. The other comes from the success stories circulating on social media: drop out, start your company. When education moved entirely onto screens during the pandemic, many young people were left alone with the question: "Am I studying for nothing?"

An observation by Kaan Gülten, founder of Girişimci Kafası, sums up the shift: for early-stage startups that begin as an idea online, grow, and are looking for new team members, degrees and level of education are no longer as decisive as they once were; personal growth, creativity, fitting in with the team and innovative ideas come to the fore.

But Gorky's story undoes both promises. A degree alone is no guarantee of a future, and skipping school is no recipe for success. The real question is where and how you learn.

Use university as a community, not a building

Gorky's real university was the back room of a grocer's shop full of students. A campus is not just lecture halls either: clubs, societies, projects, lecturers' office hours, perhaps even your future co-founder. If you are studying, use that community deliberately.

Build things while you study

Derenkov's bakery was a small business set up to meet a need, and its customers were the students right next door. Today you can do the same thing on a much smaller budget: an e-commerce experiment, a content channel, a service aimed at your campus. You do not have to choose between school and a startup; both can be a laboratory at the same time.

Collect proof of what you can do, not certificates

Credentials can open a door, but what keeps you inside is the work you can show. Keep a record of the projects you have done, the code you have written, the small business you have built and what you have learned. If you are torn between a salaried job and working for yourself, this article looks at the question from both sides.

Do not decide to drop out based on stories

The stories of people who left school and built giant companies get told over and over; the stories of those who left and disappeared do not. If you are going to make that call, have an idea that works, a few paying customers and a plan for going back.

The university was really a guild

The word "university" comes from the Latin "universitas": a whole, a community, a union. As the historian Charles Homer Haskins wrote in 1923, the word has nothing to do with the universe or the universality of knowledge. It simply means the whole of a group, whether barbers, carpenters or students. In the Middle Ages the name was given to the unions that students and teachers formed in Bologna and Paris to protect their rights.

In Bologna the first union was a mutual-aid guild set up by students who had come to the city from far away. Against townspeople who inflated rents and the prices of basic necessities, they threatened to leave the city en masse; in the end they won the power to set the prices of lodgings and books through their own representatives. Then it was the teachers' turn. According to the 1317 statutes Haskins cites, a teacher could not miss a single day of lectures without permission, and if he wanted to leave the city he had to leave a deposit as a guarantee that he would return. If he could not draw five listeners to an ordinary lecture, he was fined as if he had not turned up at all. He began his lecture at the bell and left no later than one minute after the next bell. Skipping a section was forbidden.

In other words, the first university was an organisation of students who wanted value for their money. Young people who question the value of a degree today are not really doing anything new; they are going back to the idea the university was founded on.

A final word

Montaigne wrote this more than four hundred years ago, in the chapter of his Essays on the education of children:

"To know by heart is not to know; it is merely to keep what has been entrusted to memory. What we truly know, we use without looking at the model, without turning our eyes to the book."

Behind your degree, how many things can you use without looking at the book, and in which basement, which shop, at which table did you learn them?