What would happen to Stanford if the tech bubble burst? Especially since a lot of students are drawn to Stanford because of Silicon Valley?
nothing…
a tech bubble also burst here in 2000.
Stanford has been around for 125 years, and not ALL students go there , or will go there in the future in order to get into SV.
Stanford has been the top fund raising university in the US for the past 10 of 11 years… which includes the financial collapse of 2008-9 that affected every facet of our economy from tech to banking, retail to mining, real estate to credit etc… Stanford is a major center of innovation and will remain a major center of innovation through the inevitable boom and busts that follow the credit cycles. Actually some of the best times to start a company are during times of busts when pessimism abounds… more access to laid off high caliber talent:)
honestly, no. technology is becoming increasingly a vital part of our lives, see Moore’s law… I don’t see that changing anytime soon, regardless of economic recessions.
In a severe economic downturn, it won’t be the top colleges who are damaged, it will be the schools at the margins. The top 50 - 100 schools will be just fine.
I think that Stanford will continue to be one of the world’s great universities, but the fact that Silicon Valley has been in an up cycle for a while has definitely helped the university in recent years.
This will probably seem like ancient history to some, but it wasn’t all that long ago that a number of currents were going the other way at Stanford . . . Loma Prieta earthquake that closed a number of campus buildings for years and caused a significant hit to the university’s finances; a dispute with the federal government over research funding that endangered a big part of the university’s budget; etc.
Of course Stanford came out on the other side of all that in a strong position and will continue to be one of the world’s best universities in any economic scenario I can think of. But if we are in a tech bubble and it bursts, that wouldn’t be good for Stanford.
Well, if you google it, it will tell you when the next bubble will be. So, no worries. We probably should worry more about large sigma events than what we think that could happen.