Following my recent article debunking the myth that STEM majors are inherently more valuable than humanities majors, I have been asked about whether the myth continues to hold true in the world of entrepreneurship, where majoring in STEM seems to give founders a significant leg up. It is true that STEM fields of study are by far the most commonly seen among startup founders across North America. But how valid is the belief that the golden ticket to a career in entrepreneurship is a fundamentally technical education?
According to Ilya Strebulaev, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business who routinely publishes on founder demographics, startup culture, and venture insights, computer science was unequivocally the most popular undergraduate major among unicorn founders. This is corroborated by the fact that 42% of unicorns “had at least one founder with an undergraduate degree in this major.” Looking beyond companies that are worth $1B+, the same study shows that even when looking at a random sample of startup companies, 28% had at least one computer science major on their founding teams. The second most popular major among unicorn founders is, unsurprisingly, engineering, accounting for 31% of unicorn startups studied. Social science subjects like economics and business come in third and fourth respectively.
What undergraduate majors have a higher likelihood of “producing” a unicorn?
The importance of STEM and the social sciences does not fade as we look further into founders’ graduate educational backgrounds. Business rises to the top as the most popular graduate field of study among both unicorn and random sample founders, followed by engineering and computer science. The first humanities-adjacent field that surfaces is law in fifth place, with only 10% of unicorn founders falling into that category.
What graduate majors have a higher likelihood of “producing” a unicorn?
The premise of Professor Strebulaev’s studies is not just to analyze the demographics of startup founders, but to come up with what he terms “odds ratios” for the likelihood of someone becoming a unicorn founder. This refers to the ratio of the percentage of unicorn founders in a given subject category over the percentage of random sample founders in the same category. Taking computer science undergraduate majors as an example, the odds ratio is 1.5 (42/28), leading to Strebulaev’s conclusion “that founders of US-based VC-backed startups with an undergraduate degree in computer science are 1.5 times more likely than average to found a US unicorn.” This has led some readers to believe that this study demonstrates causation and not just correlation, with comments such as the following peppering the LinkedIn post: “Great study and very informative. I am advising most of the high schoolers to go for CS when compared to other majors in Engg [sic] and STEM.” Another aspiring entrepreneur comments that “Inspiring to those of us still choosing to study CS even with the current job market for software engineers.” Some have attempted to point out the potential gender bias at play here as well as the disproportionate representation of technology and software companies within the sample.
Whether or not we understand these results as STEM majors actively giving aspiring founders a boost in their entrepreneurial careers, many read into the unspoken flip side of the message, which is that majoring in English literature or philosophy is neither correlated with nor leads to significant advantage. The number of students who choose to major in the humanities in the United States has dropped from a high of nearly one in five in the late 1960s to one in 20 in 2025, a trend that is mirrored in other places like Canada and Europe. However, is that because society has us believing that the only path to entrepreneurship is through STEM and the social sciences, or are there truly no transferable humanistic skills that potentially accelerates an aspiring founder’s work?
In a 2017 article published in the Atlantic, Jon Marcus, the editor of higher-education at the Hechinger report analyzes a bold decision made by McMaster University’s DeGroote School of Business. The department has made it a requirement for students to “take philosophy, language, culture, and other humanities courses toward an eventual degree in business”. The director of this new program Emad Mohammad said that the decision was based on their research into traits and skills valued by the corporate world and by employers - “critical thinking, communication, cultural perspective.” One of the required courses McMaster business students are asked to take is a humanities course called “Insight and Inquiry: Questions to Change to World” to give them the perspective on social problems and data-driven inquiry; students will also cover “Sentence and Communication Structure in Modern English” and “Language and Society” to help them develop skills to “closely parse financial statements and earnings reports”.
In a previous article, I also highlighted that durable skills taught in the humanities are highly valued in the corporate world - whether in startup founders or in corporate employees. According to the 2018 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, three attributes stand out when it comes to evaluating college graduates for potential positions: written communication, problem-solving, and teamwork. In addition, according to an AAC&U poll, more than three-quarters of employers surveyed favor applicants who “understand other cultures.” In recent years, there have also been increasing research on the role that the humanities plays in the world of entrepreneurship. The Entrepreneurial Humanities: The Crucial Role of the Humanities in Enterprise by Alain-Philippe Durand and Christine Henseler is one such seminal study. It highlights the disconnect between our world where “students are given the message that to change the world - or to make money - the arts and humanities are not the subjects to study” and the fact that “discussions of innovation and entrepreneurship highlight the importance of essential skills, such as critical thinking, storytelling, cultural awareness, and ethical decision-making.”
It may already be too late to reverse the mass exodus from the humanities that began after the 1960s, but I believe there is hope. If it is any consolation to aspiring humanistic entrepreneurs despairing about their chances of making it, I am someone who walked that path and have seen firsthand the benefits that my training has given me. Literature is what gave me my superpower of empathy, an elusive trait that is just as important in leadership as it is in teamwork. I spent my undergraduate and graduate career poring over French, Chinese, German, and Arabic texts, nerding out about the intricacies of language and the powerful feelings evoked by words and fictional characters. I may not have the technical skills to contribute to the Herculean task of building software (I lean on my incredible cofounder Janos Perczel and our mighty engineering team for that), but I think it is just as valuable to be able to deliver feedback and maintain my team’s performance in a motivating way that keeps morale high. I concede that being able to write beautiful French sentences doesn’t directly translate into the makings of a great leader, but the meta-ability to wield language as a galvanizing force is one of the skills that can make a good leader great.
It may be a while before we see more humanities fields pop up in the next iteration of Professor Strebulaev’s studies, and while Polygence is not (yet) a unicorn, I hope I can serve as one small counterpoint for the many humanities scholars who are teetering on the brink of taking a leap of faith into entrepreneurship.
