One of the most important threads of discussion focused on retaining entrepreneurial and technically-savvy college students here in Boston by providing them with more visibility and access into the startup ecosystem upon graduation.

The discussion ratcheted up a few notches on Saturday when Mark Zuckerberg remarked, “If I were starting (Facebook) now, I would have stayed in Boston.” (Zuck, of course, dropped out of Harvard to build Facebook from Palo Alto.) The tech press took the remark way out of context, but the hullabaloo threw a spotlight back on the essential question of how to connect talented students to Boston startups.

At the Unconference, Karl Büttner of MassChallenge asked this very question to a group of students from Babson, BU, Harvard, Tufts and MIT and several additional schools. Paul Hlatky, a BU senior, had a nice recap:

We determined the problem to be that students don’t understand the value of a start up life. Then even if they do they have no clue how to get involved. Even if they find great sources like Start Up Digest andGreenhorn Connect students need the validation from their peers and professors to seek out this culture.

On the flip side of the issue, John Prendergast of Blueleaf asked a group of recruiters, undergrad engineers and community organizers how startups can ban together and “Solve the Talent Crunch with Collective Action”.

As any startup that’s tried to hire a Ruby on Rails developer in the last year knows all too well, there’s a major crunch for technical talent. From the startup perspective, part of the problem is that students from engineering and computer science programs aren’t graduating with the technical skills necessary to be productive team members at startups from Day 1.

If a recent grad does have the skills, such as familiarity with Ruby on Rails, she has taught herself with extracurricular projects. More often, recent grads require a ramp up or apprenticeship period of at least several months. Startups simply can’t afford to train new employees that long, nor do they have the resources to find those exceptional candidates via on campus recruiting.

So startups skip on campus recruiting, even as thousands of engineering and computer science students graduate from Boston schools and join the workforce. That’s a shame, because startups so often offer much better work experience for recent grads.

All that said, there are currently several Boston-based programs and events that specifically aim at bridging the student-to-startup gap by raising the visibility and accessibility of startups among students and by accelerating the development of students’ skills so that they are more readily employable by startups.

Here are a few (though by no means an exhaustive list):

• The D8event, produced by Greenhorn Connect and Thoughtbot, which acted as a “welcome wagon for students entering the startup community as developers and designers”. (Evanish tells me the event was very successful and they’ll be producing it again in February.)
• University-backed programs like StartLabs at MIT, which has a startup job fair for MIT students planned for November.
• Workvibe (launching soon) which will show students what it’s like working at startups through digital media.
• Independently-run apprenticeship programs at Thoughtbot, Gemvara and many other startups.

Other university programs like MIT100k, HBS Startup Tribe and Northeastern’s Venture Accelerator act as catalysts for introducing students to the startup ecosystem in Boston, although they tend to focus more on founding startups versus working at them.

These local initiatives have done a great job connecting students and startups, but clearly more needs to be done for Boston to stay competitive. Without indulging too much in self-flagellation, I would like to point out that NYC has done a great job setting up internship programs, like hackNY (also see What is hackNY?) and job fairs, like theNYCStartupJobFair and SA500.

I’ve spoken with a few folks about how to place more students into Boston startups, but – in true Unconference style – I’d like to ask: what do you think? How can we bridge Boston’s student-to-startup talent gap?