The Bull Case for the University of Cincinnati

Bull & Bearcat Market

Force Binturong

Thesis: The University of Cincinnati represents a blueprint for what higher education needs to become: experiential, ROI-driven, and directly connected to the real economy. In a world where the value of a generic degree has eroded and where most students now attend college to advance their station in life, UC’s century-old Co-Op model looks prophetic. It doesn’t just teach students — it deploys them.

I. The Investor Framework

Look, the cool thing about having a blog that nobody pays for is the fact that I can talk about whatever I want to talk about. I use this blog as a way to sharpen my thoughts and help myself think through investment decisions. And not just where to literally put capital to work, but where to my attention capital as well. As a VC, there are a million different places to source new emerging technology companies as potential investments. [x number of tech companies get started every year – it can be a pretty endless pit of opportunity if you don’t try and keep your head above water.]

As a result, I do try and have somewhat of a “prepared mind” approach to my venture investing. (Although, shoutout to Andy Rachleff said to Peter Fenton when he joined the Benchmark from Accel: “Don’t bring any of that ‘prepared mind’ bullshit around here.”). Of course, the first principal at Refinery Ventures is similar to Benchmarks – if you don’t mind my reach – in the sense that we are founder-first. We are aggressively industry agnostic and instead take a horizontal approach, going super deep on talent. Often, the theses we develop have more to do with founder profile and founder-market-fit then they do with what interesting problems need to be solved in certain markets.

The questions we ask ourselves tend to focus more on whether a founder is the right person to solve a problem or the right person to see a solution through to the end. It has less to do with whether an idea is any good. In my career as a VC for the past ~7.5 years, I am not sure I have ever invested in a company at the pre-seed or seed stage which had an idea stay the exact same the entire life of the company. Even our best, most rapidly scaling companies have shifts and pivots during their life cycles. So, as my partner Tim Schigel always says, “Ideas are cheap”. (He was the first person to ever say that – don’t fact check me.)

It’s worthwhile to have a prepared mind on general industry trends so I know what the most interesting people are working on at any one time. But even that can be somewhat of a misleading strategy, because the best founders are the ones who make industries interesting, not the other way around.

Instead, I spend most of my time trying to identify where the best founders are coming from. Especially when it comes to a firm like mine, based in the Midwest where that answer is not as straightforward as it sometimes appears to be in the Bay Area – Big Tech, Stanford, Ivy League, etc. seemingly being a golden passport into venture capital land out there. Of course, the reality is FAR more nuanced than that, but the point still stands: there are more patterns in Silicon Valley to match simply because there have been more shots on goal (and more points on the board).

Whereas, in the Midwest, we have fewer shots on goal - meaning big, successful wins - that act as a torchlight to tell us what winners are going to look like next time around. We are also just generally more geographically diverse and less dense. So doing pattern matching can be more difficult. I am constantly assessing and reassessing potential hotbeds for startup talent and founders, like big companies, different cities, successful startups, and universities.

That last one can be somewhat of a trap – for one thing, there is a lot of bias involved in universities in general. When someone attends a school, it, by nature, skews their perception of said school, as well as other schools as a result, like rivals and similar entities. On top of that, schools are constantly changing. And talent, while certainly is impacted by a university, is frequently more impacted by experiences post-school. College is, after all, a ~4 year endeavor, whereas four years at one company can sometimes be seen as a blip.

Of course, the school you choose to attend can sometimes say a lot about a person’s makeup in general. But even that is not a great indicator, as we never really know what someone’s circumstances are when they are 17/18 to really determine if that school decision was made on level playing field as everyone else.

School choice is a fairly week signal. Making a personal time-investment into a university is just not something I want to partake in a whole lot.

II. Acknowledging my Bias

She Is Beautiful

But there is one school that I have a deep affinity for and a lifelong bias around – the University of Cincinnati. My Bearcats have held a special place in my heart for quite some time. My father and mother went there as well as my paternal grandfather and numerous members of my family, on both sides. Despite the fact that my maternal grandfather played football at Xavier University, I grew up hating UC’s crosstown foes with deep passion, especially during basketball season. I attended football games during the Rick Minter era and as a young lad I cried when I found out Kenyon Martin broke his leg during the C-USA conference tournament. My favorite Skyline Chili location is the one on Ludlow Avenue. I co-oped (a verb at UC) at five different companies while at school. I was lucky enough to graduate from there. I even met my wife there.

For the uninitiated, those things might seem like deep cuts. But for any true Bearcat, those aren’t even that interesting personal facts – but fairly run of the mill for a school with as much history at UC.

But it’s all to say – I acknowledge my bias. I want to see UC do well – there is no denying it. Call it sunk cost fallacy or whatever you want, but it’s very real. So it should not be a surprise to everyone that I constantly find myself looking for reasons to be supportive and bullish on the Bearcats. The flipside can also be true, however. I frequently find myself judging the product from UC much more harshly than I do other institutions in the region. When I am hiring a co-op for Refinery, I definitely hold the Bearcats who apply to a much higher standard.

On top of all of this, it will come as no surprise to anybody that has ever met me in person, but I was a tour guide at the University of Cincinnati while I was an undergraduate. Moreover, I was the president of the tour guide organization while there – it wasn’t just something I did to put on a resume, I deeply cared about it. In my post-college life, I frequently find myself still selling the University of Cincinnati to anyone who would listen.

In the past the conversation was a little straightforward:

1. It’s co-op program is incredible.

2. The campus is beautiful.

3. It’s in Cincinnati, which is an incredible place to live, work, and play.

If challenged beyond that, I had plenty of well-practice rebuttals. But I centered my argument around those three things. And really, I was the king of banging the drum for the co-op program. Which, to be fair, is a radically cool thing.

But as time has gone on, my resolve around the University of Cincinnati has only grown. And, while acknowledging my bias, I actually think the power of the co-op program is only growing stronger. So I could make deeper arguments in favor of the University of Cincinnati’s upward trajectory such as the following:

1. Co Op program

2. Great engineering & Design Schools

3. Big School right in the heart of Cincinnati – right in the heart of America

4. Healthcare Corridor

5. The Campus is STILL Beautiful

6. It’s on an upward trajectory

But I am not sure it is necessary to update my bull case. The Co-Op program, and UC’s ability to execute upon it, might be all that needs stated to establish a winning argument.

III. What Is the Co-Op Program?

The refresher on what the co-op program is for the uninitiated: co-op is short for co-operative education. It is the practice of sending current undergraduate students to go work in real world, non-academic settings. This is not research work and it’s not working the front desk at the local pool in the Summer. Engineers go work for engineering firms, designers go work for designers, and business students go work basically anywhere business is done. And, very critically, it is not just done in the Summer or part-time. Co-op “rotations” (as they are called) are for the full semester, any semester, and the student works full time. The student will effectively take zero classes during the semester in which they are working. Their sole focus & responsibility, as a student, is to work in the “real world”.

In some ways, these are just full-time internships. But the big difference is in the fact that the school actually MANDATES that students get these co-ops in order to get a degree. And, as a result, the school has built up a support apparatus to make sure that students can get these co-ops and get the most out of them along the way. The three colleges that mandate co-op, Design, Engineering, and Business, have a minimum number of rotations required to graduate. But for frame of reference, when I was in school, I was on the higher end of the trend and did six rotations.

And these are, for the most part, paid positions. If you talk to someone who graduated from UC in the ‘70s or 80’s, they will tell you how their co-ops helped them pay for most of their tuition bill. Unfortunately, that would be pretty tough to pull off these days (although, UC’s tuition has stayed flat-ish since I went there). But these rotations do put some cash in the pockets of students who can use it to pay for rent, or books, or a new laptop, or a down payment on a car, or, in my case a couple of times, several cases of beer. The average co-op student makes ~$11K per co-op rotation, nothing to sneeze at.

Of course, all of the benefits that come from a traditional full-time internship also apply to a co-op. But you get to do more of them. And, the school has an institutional bias towards supporting its students who are “on co-op”. Meaning, that when you are doing your internship off campus, the school has a variety of means to help support you while you are away and for when you are back. Professors do their best to include the co-op experience in the actual classroom setting. They frequently ask students to apply the academic theory they are currently learning to the real world experiences they have just had.

But beyond just helping me be a better finance student, it also broadly helped me focus my time within the classroom. When I got to school, I wanted to get into wealth management. I was tailoring my course load to be more Investment-Advisor-focused. I did one rotation at a wealth management firm and realized that it wasn’t for me. That helped put me on the private investments path I am on today, and it helped me figure out what classes I actually wanted to take. Instead of taking courses on public securities, I took corporate finance classes and ones more oriented towards banking. There are a lot of students who will even pick up new majors of minors after time on a co-op rotation.

They always say: co-op is great for helping you find what you DON’T want to do as much as it is for finding what you do want to do.

IV. Why Does this Matter?

On top of all of this anecdotal evidence is just the fact that most colleges are currently being scrutinized on whether or not they drive any ROI for students. What is the return on investment for most colleges and college students?

A long time ago, the ROI for secondary education was almost intentionally opaque. You would go to college only because you would be expanding your mind. You would study the humanities, literature, arts, etc and this in turn would make you a more well-rounded person. You would not go to college because that would get you a better job. You would go to college to become a better, more learned person.

And, for what it’s worth, if that is WHY you are going to college, I think that’s a perfectly noble pursuit. However, a lot of people don’t go to college for this reason. Many people don’t attend college merely for intellectual growth or to expand their mind. In modern America, a dominant motivation is economic advancement — to land better jobs, improve life outcomes, or gain skills that help in the real world. This is affirmed in multiple student surveys that list “employment / career outcomes” among the top reasons for attending college.

That doesn’t mean that intellectual or personal growth motives are extinct — they still matter for many — but in the current climate of rising costs and job uncertainty, the balance has shifted. College is increasingly approached as an investment, not just a rite of passage.

To be more specific, the value of a college degree has gone down significantly over the last couple of decades. It used to be that getting any college degree would result in a person’s ability to advance their status in life. That has, as of recently, been effectively eroded entirely. Instead, the TYPE of degree you get is much more fundamentally important.

I won’t belabor the debate on why someone should go to college. There are a ton of reasons. But for a lot of people, the reason is to advance you station. And if that’s the case, then you want to attend a school that will set you up for success in that regard.

That’s the cool thing about co-op, the ROI for co-op is deeply straightforward. Will you be prepared for the real world? Absolutely. As a graduating co-op student, you have just spend 1-2 years, non-consecutively, in the real world, and then applying those lessons academically. It would be impossible not to be more prepared for the real world. The world more frequently is requiring competent, capable people, who have high agency. Agency is at a premium in a world that is constantly changing.

And in a world that is constantly changing, the University of Cincinnati quietly built a machine that produces capability. And that’s why, 100 years after it invented Co-Op, UC might just be the most future-proof university in America.