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Team GhostShell returned late Monday with Project WestWind: a leak of 120,000 records from 100 major universities around the world.

Team GhostShell is the hacking group behind Project Hellfire, which launched in August this year. Project Hellfire lifted 1 million accounts from 100 websites around the world, compromising data from the CIA and from Wall Street.

The hacked data leaked in Project WestWind does indeed appear to come from a who's who of major learning institutions. They include Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, Tokyo University, Cornell and New York University.

In their Pastebin announcement, Team GhostShell said Project WestWind was a serious effort to jump-start a dialogue on the state of higher education today. Apparently this hack wasn't pranksterism for the lulz, but hacktivism for the greater good:

We wanted to bring to your attention different examples from Europe, how the laws change so often that even the teachers have a hard time adjusting to them, let alone, the students, to the US, where tuition fees have spiked up so much that by the time you finish any sort of degree, you will be in more debt than you can handle and with no certainty that you will get a job, to Asia, where strict & limited teachings still persist and never seem to catch up with the times and most of the time fail to prep you up for a world where foreign affairs are crucial in this day and age.

The hackers ask that others use the information as a conversation starter, team member DeadMellox writing:

You don't have to talk about it with us, what's important is that you bring up the subject 'today's education' in day-to-day conversations with your family, friends, people close to you and try to understand the system better, together. How it works, how a certain type of diploma can or cannot help you in your road to the career you want to pursue.

Though Team GhostShell's data dump contains user screen names and mostly hashed passwords (Betabeat examined one file in which some of the passwords were apparently cracked), they claim they've kept the leaked records to a minimum.

Team GhostShell issued a warning to the targeted institutions regarding the states of their networks: "When we got there, we found out that a lot of them have malware injected. No surprise there since some have credit card information stored."

Betabeat has reached out to a web network administrator at one of the hacked universities for comment and will update this post if we receive a response.

Ms. Kunst

Minority Report is a guest column by Sarah Kunst, who does business development and product at fashion app Kaleidoscope. She’s a black, non-engineer female in tech, but plans to IPO anyway.

Few founder origin stories capture the nerd mind like "Hacker as dropout." From Bill Gates at Microsoft to Box's Adam Levie, and of course a little-known CEO named Zuck, the allure of leaving the dorm room behind to rake in billions seems irresistible.

Recently, this middle finger to the establishment of higher education has been codified by billionaire rabble rouser Peter Thiel. This past Sunday, for the second time in three months, the New York Times found cause for a close examination of the virtues of Mr. Thiel's 20 under 20 Fellowship as a way for exceptional teenagers to pass college and collect $100,000 to spend on changing the world. Granted, participants aren't your typical undeclared freshmen at State College U. Rather, they've already exhibited Mensa-level intelligence, with a work ethic to match.

What doesn't coordinate quite as well? Their social lives. A recent night saw several Thiel fellows--all under legal drinking age--at a San Francisco house party described by one attendee as "tech hippies doing drugs and sitting in a cuddle pile."

It was an unsettling sight for guests surprised by the Summer of Love manifesting itself in 2012, but for the babes in the Redwoods it seemed disturbing on another level. A Thiel fellow who dropped out of an Ivy League college at age 17 spent most of her brief time at the party hugging her purse and asking for clarification about what, exactly, a whippet was.

Perhaps most telling, even those who've won the GED lottery don't believe it's a one-size-fits-all solution. In a recent interview, Mr. Levie, the Box CEO who dropped out of USC, told Business Insider, "Unfortunately this is going to produce a lot of people that are college drop outs that don't actually have the idea that's taking off that they can go spend time on. It's not the right sequence." Leaving school to become a billionaire seems logical, ending up sans degree or hockey stick company while former classmates field offers from hot tech, banking and graduate programs sounds less practical.

Tipping our hat to Malcolm Gladwell, we can acknowledge that most truly great engineers were coding long before their first CS course in college. But many other skills integral to growing a company are learned in and out of the classroom in ways the "real world" can't always match. Morgan Missen, who attended my alma mater Michigan State University (as did Texts From Last Night founder Lauren Leto), credits her illustrious recruiting career, which has included stints at Google, Twitter and Foursquare, to her collegiate role as recruitment chair of the Sigma Kappa sorority. "It was highly strategic and strictly choreographed. I realized then how the people you pick affect the success of every organization," Ms. Missen told an interview earlier this year.

Visiting Google, Facebook, or even Conde Nast--the similarities between work campus and college campus can't be overlooked: Cafeteria as social minefield, new recruits wearing special clothing to signal their n00b status, recreational sports leagues and gossip running amok. Assuming these cultures are so prevalent because employees enjoy them, how do people whose last experience in a classroom involved a hall monitor create a corporate culture that approximates the light oversight and high expectations of a college campus?

UPenn has become a bastion for fraternity men turned successful startup founders. Bonobos got their start there out of Andy Dunn's trunk. Adam Rich and Ben Lerer's bromance started on campus and turned into Thrillist. Cy Massoumi went there before a banking career that lead to Zocdoc. Indeed, investor about town David Tisch is one of the many former UPenn frat boys redefining Silicon Alley.

Harvard Business School has a similar pedigree among ladies. Alexa Von Tobel from Learnvest, Amy Jain and Daniella Yacobovsky of Baublebar, Go Try It On's Marissa Evans and Birchbox's Katia Beauchamp all overlapped. Birchbox is even paying it forward with an informal co-working space for HBS students in their cavernous Murray Hill offices. The shared experiences and ups and downs of these confederacies give the alums shoulders to cry on and investor referrals that just don't come from coding alone in your parents' basement.

Skipping the formative years of college might give kids an accolade advantage, but at what cost to their social lives and networks? Are they really better off on their own with enough money to pay the bills for a couple years than they would be in R&D labs at schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT and University of Michigan? Those six schools, which boasted a combined endowment of $102 billion in 2011, supply brilliant minds with world class facilities and faculty, flexibility to pursue research and degrees of their choosing. As Harvard proved with Facebook, they also will do little to interfere with profits or process should a runaway success emerge out of the dining halls and dorm rooms. Additionally, students have an alumni network, clean and affordable housing, ready access to regular meals and a safe place to spend the years between having a curfew and polishing up your public speaking for an IPO road show.

Where would Instagram be without the contacts Kevin Systrom forged at the Stanford frat Sigma Nu, where he first met Mark Zuckerberg and Adam D'Angelo? Or even Facebook without the early adopters on college campuses who were ready to sign up and tell their friends as soon as the social network arrived. Without an early job serving as campus marketing manager for Apple and working for valley mainstays like Path's Dave Morin would my personal and professional interest in technology have blossomed? Outliers always have and will forge their own paths in education and life, but for many, the network effects of college are worth checking in to.

High praise.

Today is the online debut of Forbes' "Top Colleges" issue. Only they should have called it the "Top College" issue, because--though the rankings aren't online yet--that big splashy profile of Instagram founder Kevin Systrom makes it pretty clear that Stanford is coming out ahead. Apologies all around to Cornell, Technion, Columbia, NYU, MIT, Harvard...

Mr. Systrom's debt to his alma mater is no secret, and Ken Auletta's New Yorker profile is really patient zero in this epidemic of Stanford Fever, but Forbes takes it to the next level, devoting a fair bit of the piece to crowning the Palo Alto Trade School as king of the academic hill, tech-wise. The feature is full of lines like this:

"These windfalls, serendipitous as they seem from the outside, are almost never accidental. In Systrom’s case his good fortune can be traced directly to Stanford."

And this:

"It was on the Palo Alto campus that Systrom got his first look at the worlds of tech and venture capital, his first internship at a startup and his first job at Google."

And this:

"Systrom’s Stanford dividends continued long after graduation."

Oh, and here's a whole video on the subject, titled "How Stanford Made Instagram's Kevin Systrom a Silicon Valley Star":

We like to imagine that Michael Bloomberg is, this very minute, summoning university officials from all over the East Coast to a top-secret summit in the abandoned City Hall subway stop, like a team of academic Super Friends.

In fact, maybe it would look a little something like this:

Bloomberg: "I thought we agreed this could not be allowed to happen," his icy gaze sweeping across the room. (Unlikely enforcers David Karp and Dennis Crowley stand next to him, cracking their knuckles meaningfully.) NYU president John Sexton is the first to look away; Cornell-Technion Innovation Institute Director Craig Gotsman stares him down. Notably absent is Harvard University president Drew Faust.

Or at least, that's how we like to imagine it.

Camera's up here, Zuck. (Photo: Bloomberg News)

What does it take to overshadow an Olympian? If you guessed "Be Mark Zuckerberg," please collect your prize. Bloomberg News profiles Samyr Laine, who is headed to the London Olympics to represent Haiti in the triple jump. Heartwarming! But it's not a news peg. You know what's a news page? Being the Facebook founder's former freshman roommate.

Asked about his youthful days with the billionaire, Mr. Laine presumably heaved a great, big sigh and said:

"We had a good time our freshman year in Straus, we played a ton of PlayStation,” Laine said in an interview at his home in Lorton, Virginia. “We probably didn’t sleep nearly as much as we should have. None of us slept as little as Mark did, and now you can see why.”

This man is literally about to go for the gold, and all anyone wants to talk about is some famous guy he used to bunk with. Ain't no problems like Harvard grad problems.

Widener Library. (Photo: flickr.com/cthulhuwho1)

On a clear November day, the hard-working students of Harvard College took a collective study break and poured onto the walkway in front of Lamont Library. Undergrads, an inordinate number of them sporting hoodies, pressed their bodies against a set of temporary barricades, their smartphones and cameras held aloft, eyes intent on a grinning visitor making his way from one of the Yard’s gates to a mic stand that had been set up smack in the middle of the walkway.

The excitement wasn’t for Jason Segel, who would be selected as the Hasty Pudding’s Man of the Year in February, nor for Andy Samberg, who’d be tapped to give the Class Day Speech later that year, but a former classmate—a “concentrator” in computer science and psychology—who eight years ago had been just like them, a hard-working kid with amazing grades and questionable social skills, well on his way to a comfortable future.

As Mark Zuckerberg paused to answer questions, the giddiness was almost enough to make everyone forget that, like Bill Gates before him, the Facebook founder had dropped out of Harvard well before receiving his sheepskin.

Six months later, the day before Facebook’s IPO, Stanford law fellow Brian Love published an op-ed in the Boston Globe, pointing out that Harvard had a decent legal claim to a cut of the $16 billion jackpot. After all, Mr. Zuckerberg and his cofounders built the site “while enrolled in Harvard, working in a Harvard dormitory, and using Harvard’s computer network,” he wrote.

It’s impossible to say how much Harvard could have added to its already massive endowment had the university pressed the issue. But one point of comparison might be helpful: When Stanford eventually sold its shares in Google, the transaction netted the school a cool $336 million. That would go a long way toward re-energizing development on that applied sciences campus in Allston.

Still, given the millions being minted by enterprising graduates of Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and other institutions of higher learning, and the spotty track record of the nation’s most prestigious university in the emerging realm of tech-fuelled entrepreneurship, potential students might be forgiven for wondering if a Harvard education is still the best path to success in the digital age.

A poster on the Q&A site Quora recently inquired, "How does a star engineering high school senior choose among MIT, Caltech, Stanford and Harvard?" One reply compared the various colleges to houses at Harry Potter’s alma mater, Hogwarts. Guess which school got tarred with the villainous name of Slytherin? The respondent concluded: "Harvard is known for social climbing and an atmosphere where interactions are perpetually shaded with professional networking.”

Meanwhile, Harvard’s neighbor in Kendall Square, MIT--where the term “hacking” was born to describe a clever solution to a technical problem--attracts the kind of student who will turn a building facade into a game of Tetris, just for giggles, then go on to found a promising company like Dropbox. Here in the five boroughs, two Empire State bastions are taking advantage of Bloomberg’s attempted great leap forward to expand their innovative holdings. Cornell is partnering with Israel’s Technion Institute of Technology to build a starchitect-designed school of applied sciences on sleepy Roosevelt Island, while NYU is converting the MTA’s old Brooklyn headquarters into a second tech city campus.

Meanwhile, Stanford, the “Harvard of the West,” recently received the 7000-plus-word length treatment in The New Yorker for its role in the Silicon Valley talent pipeline.

The university gave birth to both Yahoo and Google; provided Instagram founder Kevin Systrom with the connections he’d need to launch his photo sharing application and, more important, sell it for a cool billion dollars; and currently provides a home base for alumnus and PayPal mafioso Peter Thiel to hold forth on entrepreneurialism (even as he offers “fellowships” for students willing to drop out and try building something of their own). Would-be tech moguls can gather at BASES, the Business Association for Stanford Entrepreneurial Students, where they can attend weekly lectures from luminaries like LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and VC Brad Feld. They wrap up the year with four simultaneous funding competitions, jockeying for $150,000 in prize money.

The University in Pennsylvania—red-headed stepchild of the Ivy League—has a strong alumni network in New York’s budding tech scene, including Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer, Local Response CEO Nihal Mehta, and the entire Warby Parker founding team. Brett Topche, who is a principal at MentorTech Ventures, a VC devoted wholly to startups emerging from the university, said Penn's pitch to prospective students is simple: “We're not just going to prepare you to go get a vice president title at some giant corporation—we're going to teach you how to create something from scratch.”

Even the humble University of Washington is getting in the game, recently dubbed “a northwest pipeline to Silicon Valley” in a flattering New York Times write-up.

This is not to say that the Crimson is in any immediate danger of becoming an also-ran. The university still sits comfortably atop the upper echelon of the world’s colleges, and every year it sends 1600 or so graduates off to top-tier professional schools, prestigious jobs at investment banks and consultancies, tenure-track Ph.D. programs and, for those naive enough to have majored in Folklore and Mythology, maybe even a reporting job at the New York Observer.

Then again, those jobs are not what they once were. Freshly minted lawyers are practically making a federal case about their grim employment prospects these days, and, with storied firms like Dewey and Leboeuf imploding, even a degree from a well-ranked law school is no guarantee of a make-it-rain corporate law salary. It’s still remotely possible for a gifted academic to find a cushy tenure track—provided they don’t mind living in Doha and they’ve got a certain dramatic flair. (Have TED talk, will travel.) Meanwhile, the 2012 presidential election is shaping up to be an alumni circular firing squad of Bain Capital versus the Harvard Law Review. And dare we even mention “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs”?

The characteristics that are viewed as most critical to success in the startup world happen to be some of the very ones that Harvard has for centuries viewed as the kiss of death for eager applicants. Harvard students are, by and large, a population of people who’ve never been described as “disruptive” in their lives. And anyone willing even to entertain the idea of failure—a badge of honor on the startup scene—might want to refrain from mentioning it in his or her admissions essay.

Of course, being out of step with the times is not always a bad thing, and Harvard can usually afford to take the long view. Founded in 1636, this august institution predates the differential calculus that makes computing possible, the piano, and the Enlightenment itself.

But the leveling effect of the Internet has only just begun to lap at the steps of Widener Library. Coding is about competence, not pedigree. A sufficiently motivated teenager can build the next online juggernaut with little more than a Code Academy account, a MacBook, and a liter of Mountain Dew. And the recent explosion in online learning will only hasten the trend, threatening the relevance not only of Harvard, but of formal education itself. (Perhaps that’s why Harvard recently partnered with MIT to launch an online learning initiative dubbed EdX.)

Harvard remains a leader in biotech and other capital-intensive fields, and it has numerous patents to show for its efforts. A consumer Internet startup doesn’t need the support of a research insitution; all it needs is some server space. While some universities have tried to assert their claim to startups created on campus (University of Missouri being a prominent example), there’s really no way to shoehorn consumer Internet innovation into a traditional research university model.

That’s one likely reason Harvard didn’t angle for a cut of Facebook: the school’s technical contribution was relatively minor. “Students, in fact, are perfectly capable of writing code in their dorm rooms,” said Brian Love, a Stanford Law fellow who’s written on the subject of university patents, and they’re “at the vanguard of what's going on in the high-tech world.” So a couple of undergraduates can team up and create something valuable “without faculty mentorship, and without funding—at least, direct funding—from the university.”

That said, Harvard University is not run by a bunch of dummies. The institution’s leadership is not about to sit back with its collective nose in a Loeb Classical Library tome while Stanford, UPenn, and NYU vie for the prestige, the superstars and the future donations that it once took for granted.

Instead, the university is unleashing a campus-wide push to spruce up entrepreneurial offerings and lend more support to would-be innovators. Hence the creation of the Innovation Lab (known on campus as the I-Lab), a new home for would-be entrepreneurs. Students contemplating the notion of starting up can attend workshops on topics like user-interface design, while those who’ve reached the idea development stage can schedule office hours with entrepreneurs-in-residence. Once they’ve got a workable idea, they can claim their own corner to work in, like a study carrel but bigger.

With its open floorplan, enormous windows, and bright yellow walls, I-Lab—a $25 million redo of the former WGBH studios—is clearly based on someone’s untested assumptions of what inspires young people to productivity. Ideas are scrawled across whiteboards; tables are equipped with wheels; power cords drop from the ceiling. There’s also a kitchen stuffed with free food and consoles for after-hours gaming.

In 2011, the school announced something called the Experiment Fund,  a venture capital fund based at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which will make seed-stage investments in companies with some connection to Cambridge. Eager to avoid any conflicts of interest, Harvard has no financial stake in the fund. Rather, SEAS offers access to faculty advisors and, once renovations are complete, will provide partner Hugo Van Vuuren with an office. So Harvard isn’t likely to make any money out of this deal, though the somewhat intangible benefits to its reputation will likely prove useful.

Mr. Van Vuuren (class of ’07) was quick to point out that the X Fund will serve Boston's entire Red Line corridor, which also includes MIT and Tufts. But he was effusive in his praise for the university as a partner, and he expressed complete faith in the school’s ability to change with the times. "A university does not remain the top university in the world for 375 years without adapting," he said.

The question is whether a real cultural shift can take root with sufficient speed in such staid soil. Harvard hasn’t been a startup in centuries. Nor is the school particularly famous for its population of engineers and entrepreneurs. Tuan Ho, whom The Observer found working in the I-Lab when we visited a couple of months ago, graduated in 2009 and is now the cofounder of Tivli, a digital TV startup aiming to disrupt the cable business. When he was an undergraduate, Mr. Ho explained, Mark Zuckerberg was "like, the one guy who did a startup—in spite of Harvard."

Yet the student body seems ready to force the issue if they must. Harvard’s introductory computer science course, CS-50, is bursting at the seams. That growth is due partly to the aggressive evangelical efforts of instructor David Malan, said teaching fellow Lexi Ross, but she also name-checked both The Social Network and the near billion-dollar Instagram acquisition as having had an effect.

"You didn't have to be a computer science person to know what was going on," she said.

Peter Boyce, a founding member of Hack Harvard, has also seen a shift. Mr. Boyce started out on the “Goldman quant” track, but found himself seduced after a summer at Skillshare, a New York-based startup that aims to be a kind of Airbnb for those with in-demand skills. “It’s a more popular option,” he said of the startup track. “I still don’t think it’s, you know, the most popular option.”

To some, the problem is best viewed in economic terms. Even with the troubles on Wall Street, there’s still not much real incentive for students to venture out onto any entrepreneurial limbs.

“The opportunity cost for them to become entrepreneurs is much higher than the grads of regular schools,” said entrepreneur and academic Vivek Wadhwa. MIT, on the other hand, “has a huge advantage in being an engineering school—so grads leave with excellent technical knowledge and mentors. Their likelihood of success is higher and opportunity cost lower.”

Moreover, the entrepreneurial career path takes emotional resilience and openness to the humiliating public faceplant. “It’s a very different world now,” said Mr. Topche, one where students can choose to create their own job instead of pursuing one at a multi-billion-dollar corporation. But that requires a different skill set, he noted, “and the schools that figure out how to prepare students with that very different skill set, I think, will have a very big advantage in the coming decades.”

All your startups are belong to you. (Photo: Harvard.edu)

Mark Zuckerberg-adjacent opportunists are getting more creative in their efforts to cash in on Facebook—another one of Zuck's old classmates just lost a suit against the producers of The Social Network for "defamation by omission." But there may be one entity with a real case for a claim: Harvard University.

"Harvard University could have asserted a stronger claim to the company than the Winklevoss twins and Paul Ceglia combined," Stanford Law fellow Brian Love wrote in the Boston Globe earlier this month.

Zuck started Facebook while an undergrad at Harvard, where he presumably used some university resources. That fact opens Facebook's founders up to a claim by Harvard. After all, Stanford finagled itself a slice of Google and the University of Illinois asserted rights over Netscape.

But rather than try to squeeze money from one of its richest and most famous non-alumni, the university opted for the high road. Mr. Love lauds the move:

Fortunately, Harvard’s minor role in Facebook’s history has attracted a different reaction: a star-studded Hollywood blockbuster, a reinvigorated reputation as a dream school for entrepreneurial teens, and warm feelings among millionaire alumni who may become large donors. By contrast, few know that modern web browsing was born at the University of Illinois, and Netscape’s embittered founders vowed never to give another dime to their alma mater-turned-adversary.

Here’s hoping officials at the collegiate home of the next Facebook know which university made the better deal.

"Harvard University: because we won't sue you" has a nice ring to it.

DO NOT GO TO THERE!

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel pushed the debate about whether a college education is worth the student debt past the tipping point--he'd rather pay smart kids $100,000-a-piece to build a start-up--but the argument has taken on a life of its own.

Entrepreneurs have long romanticized the notion of a boot-strapped, self-taught success and held a healthy skepticism over whether a classroom can prepare you for the business world. But Eli Portnoy, a TechStars alum/Harvard MBA and CEO of ThinkNear, a location-based services start-up that helps merchants drive traffic to stores during down periods, takes an updated look at the current landscape.

It's no longer just a choice between going to college or venturing out on your own. With the proliferation of incubators and accelerators, especially top programs offering a credible alternative, Mr. Portnoy delves into the specifics, outlining the upsides of going to TechStars versus getting a Harvard MBA. His conclusion?

If you know you want to start a company there is nothing more helpful than TechStars and I would strongly suggest going through the program ahead of an MBA. The experience is more relevant, the network more concentrated, and the cost (hard cash and in opportunity) lower. In the long-run I am not sure which will prove more helpful (though I suspect the brand cache of an MBA program will be longer lasting), but the direct benefits of being in an incubator/accelerator are unmatched and the opportunity unparalleled if you are thinking of starting a tech based business.

Sounds good in theory. Too bad TechStars is now harder to get into than the Ivy League.