The American West Has Fallen: Stanford Is Losing its Identity

“[Stanford] is hallowed by no traditions. It is hampered by none.” 

That’s what founding president David Starr Jordan declared when founding our university, which has since become famed as a counterweight to the pretentious and stuffy Ivy League colleges. Its status as the pre-eminent university of the American West afforded it autonomy from the East Coast, and thus a unique culture developed as it grew with Silicon Valley. Even former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg praised our unique traditions and status as an incubator of entrepreneurship in a 2013 commencement speech. 

While countless articles have bemoaned Stanford’s “war on social life,” “search for meaning,” and the increasing banality of our student body, a deeper truth underlies all of these phenomena. As Stanford has risen to increasing prominence in American society, its identity and ethos has become nationalized, stamping out our regional character. Stanford formerly drew more from top applicants in Western America, and its lesser prominence meant a higher activation energy was required for those outside of California to apply. In turn, “tracked” applicants ignored Stanford in lieu of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the like. Those who came from the East often did so with at least an appreciation for the Wild West's ideals. Today the same gunners who eyed colleges along the Acela Corridor now turn their sights on Stanford.

Many of the common complaints about the shifts in Stanford’s culture can be explained by this reality. Not only did our isolation from stuffy East Coast culture allow us to be known as a school of the Wild West, with traditions such as Full Moon on the Quad (which was completely forgotten about in 2025 after being progressively sanitized over the past decade) and housing the watersports mecca of Lake Lag, but it also fostered a distinctive and powerful relationship with Silicon Valley. This relationship was born from our regional identity, as Stanford and high-tech industries and venture capital firms along Sand Hill Road co-developed an entrepreneurial culture in a rebuke of Eastern economic interests. 

In the 2000s, however, Stanford’s PayPal Mafia revived consumer-focused tech companies after the dotcom bust, a young Mark Zuckerberg moved west, and “Google” became a synonym for search. Stanford’s eminence, while always well-known, became even more prominent as tech surged. Compounding this was the financial crisis of 2008, as hordes of strivers shifted their aspirations from majoring in English, history, or economics at Harvard to land a job at Lehman Brothers. They envisioned that, by studying computer science, they could become the next Larry Page, or at least score a cushy six-figure job, complete with workplace ball pits and arcade rooms.

As legions of ladder-climbers flooded the gates of Main Quad, the pool of our applicants expanded in scope to include a more national audience burgeoned by Silicon Valley’s stardom. What formerly distinguished Stanford for its less “tracked” approach, our more regional and self-selecting applicant pool, was lost, as the university displaced Harvard as the most sought after “dream school” in 2013. It should come as no surprise, then, that the path to start-ups has become a tracked career trajectory. Students arrive on campus already familiar with venture capital, as programs like Y Combinator’s startup accelerator have morphed a similar resume-builder to an internship with Goldman Sachs or McKinsey.

A decline in both the quality of Stanford’s start-up culture, as well as the associated student life, are the natural consequences of becoming more tied to the hegemony of the “Ivy+.” Stanford has become the victim of its own success as swarms of careerist students think that acceptance into the school will magically turn them into the next Unicorn founders. Since the days of Evan Spiegel, hardly any impactful startups have originated from the Farm. Among the most notable since then have included e-cigarette pioneer JUUL and the Indian grocery delivery service Zepto, whose creators ironically were admitted to Stanford, but never set foot on campus before dropping out. 

Escalating competition in the zero-sum college admissions game has not counted Stanford as the only victim of its homogenizing effect. Princeton, for instance, lost its status as the “Southern Ivy.” Notably, being further amalgamated into the national system of elite colleges has also spread some of Stanford and California’s cultural power eastwards. The second-most popular major at Harvard is now computer science, barely falling behind economics, and even the most liberal arts focused of East Coast schools, like Amherst and Brown, now host venture capital clubs.

While a result of Stanford’s prosperity and prominent national profile, these developments which sap the university of its unique appeal are more than an intangible cultural loss—they also deprive the school of its comparative advantage over the Princetons, Yales, and Harvards of the world. As the only undisputed Top 5 university west of the Mississippi, Stanford’s uniquely Western emphasis should not be a vestige of the university’s founding, but something more consciously preserved. As part of a broader movement to restore the glory of the Bay Area and Silicon Valley as a distinctive and irreplicable economic ecosystem, to be a Stanford man must mean something different than studying in New Haven or Cambridge. It is imperative that Stanford maintain its West Coast identity in the modern, homogenized world, and resist morphing into the institutions we were made to counter.