By the time she was a junior, Mackenzie Burnett had put herself on course for a career in foreign policy. Her résumé was stacked with government internships, extensive service work, and a stellar academic record at the University of Maryland.
Then a friend told her about Startup Shell. A bunch of students had cleared out a storage room on campus and were using it to work on personal projects at night, like 3-D mapping software. Ms. Burnett hardly seemed a logical fit. She was a government and international relations double major with zero technical skills. But it was love at first sight.
“I walked into the room and had that moment that I knew everyone around me was really interesting and going places,” she recalls. “All of these people were looking to do something that hadn’t been done before, instead of waiting for opportunities that already existed.”
She soon became a director of Startup Shell, channeling her organizational and fund-raising skills into expanding it, as it grew into a nonprofit incubator that students now have to apply to join. After graduation next month, Ms. Burnett plans to move to San Francisco to help start a software company, where she’ll run the business side of the operation.
Credit a culture in which tech billionaires have become as well known as sports figures, the relatively cheap costs of technology, and the stagnation of traditional career paths: Thousands of students like Ms. Burnett are gravitating toward build-it-yourself careers. Colleges are responding to this interest, and fueling it, by offering more undergraduate courses, programs, and extracurricular activities that promise to cultivate an entrepreneurial mind-set and develop skills needed in this start-up world. Risk taking, in a way, has become the new critical thinking. It’s what colleges believe they need to teach for graduates to meet the needs of today’s work force.
For students, entrepreneurship offers the creativity and independence that traditional careers seem to lack. Ms. Burnett, for example, says that spending time in government bureaucracies, where young people felt resigned to long stretches of unfulfilling work, left her disheartened. Other undergraduates worry about surviving in an economy in which industries expand and contract with alarming speed. Law, accounting, even medicine are no longer the steady career paths they once were.
For colleges, teaching entrepreneurship means cultivating a generation of innovators, whether they’re planning to start their own companies or work for someone else. It’s a facet of education — traditionally the preserve of business schools — that is still developing, particularly at the undergraduate level, and, as a result, can come across at times as a superficial blend of buzz words and rosy promises.
At their heart, entrepreneurship programs are an attempt by colleges to respond to pressures to turn out work-ready graduates. Administrators see this form of experiential learning as a way to prepare students for an unstable economy in which on-the-job training is increasingly rare, and to answer taxpayers and lawmakers who question the value of college. Professors are looking for ways to engage students more deeply in using what they’re learning in the classroom. And alumni who have made their fortunes developing new businesses are happy to finance incubators and centers.
Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, says the rise of entrepreneurship programs is part of a larger change taking place in higher education, where skill building coexists with the liberal arts. “The idea is that students aren’t in college just to take courses, they’re in college to learn how to apply their education to real-world contexts,” she says. “Entrepreneurship is simply a shorthand title for learning how to apply knowledge, skills, and judgment under conditions of uncertainty.”
The University of Maryland at College Park is one of hundreds of colleges that have embraced entrepreneurship education. Wallace D. Loh, the president, has said he wants all 37,000 students exposed to the concepts of innovation and entrepreneurship. While those themes have been familiar ones for a couple of decades, the campus has accelerated program development during the last five years or so, branding itself as a driver of innovation, a place where the founders of Oculus, Under Armour, and Google got their start.
Today Maryland is home to two residential communities for student entrepreneurs, an institute that supports technology start-ups, an entrepreneurship center in the business school, Startup Shell, a minor and a master’s degree in technology entrepreneurship, and a growing number of undergraduate courses that aim to embed those concepts in various disciplines.
Working to tie many of these efforts together is Dean Chang, an associate vice president, who was appointed two years ago as head of the new Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Housed at the heart of the campus, the academy’s brightly colored offices and meeting spaces like the Garage are designed to welcome students. Posters sporting the tagline “Fear the Turtle,” once associated primarily with the Terrapins athletic teams, line the academy’s hallways, profiling students and faculty across campus considered innovators.
Mr. Chang says he understands how difficult it can be to cultivate an entrepreneurial mind-set in students. A Maryland native and the son of two career bureaucrats, he envisioned a similar path for himself before enrolling in a robotics doctoral program at Stanford University in the early 1990s, a time when tech start-ups were just coming into their own. If not for being at a campus so focused on innovation, he says, he doubts he would have spent 15 years in Silicon Valley, where he helped turn a spinoff from the robotics lab into a major producer of haptics, or touch, technology, found in many mobile and gaming devices today.
A big part of his job at Maryland is persuading all students that the skills he’s promoting are relevant to them. The principles embedded in entrepreneurship education, he says, encourage students to approach problems from many perspectives, step outside the classroom, and become comfortable with experimentation and failure. Yet in popular imagination the term often gets reduced to the idea of making something in your garage or being part of a Silicon Valley start-up.
“Entrepreneurship is simply a shorthand title for learning how to apply knowledge, skills, and judgment under conditions of uncertainty.”
“The problem is that if you ask who is interested in entrepreneurship, only engineering and business students will raise their hands,” he says. “We have 10 other schools.”
To remedy that, Maryland began offering a slew of “Fearless Ideas” courses last fall, in which students are expected to design and test new ventures and products. One of the more popular ones, taught by a business professor, takes students through the process of creating outdoor camping gear. The courses are designed to fulfill general-education requirements and are open to all undergraduates.
The courses, though, can reach only a few hundred students. The academy is also working with campus living-learning communities, which about half of all new freshmen join, to include a two- to three-week course module that exposes students to two major trends in entrepreneurship education: design thinking and the lean start-up.
Entrepreneurship programs are hard to define, in part because the label has been placed on all kinds of offerings, including basic accounting courses and multi-million-dollar ecosystems, like Stanford University’s StartX, a nonprofit dedicated to incubating businesses.
Maryland’s model, though, is an increasingly familiar one: Hire a high-level administrator whose purpose is to promote innovation on campus, create a universitywide entrepreneurship center, support extracurricular programming like hackathons and accelerators, create space for budding entrepreneurs to work on their projects, and encourage faculty members to devise courses that develop entrepreneurial skills.
New York University, for example, created an Entrepreneurial Institute in 2012 to support and spread entrepreneurship programming and education across campus. And last year it opened the Leslie Entrepreneurs Lab, a 6,000-square-foot facility dedicated to campus start-ups.
Six years ago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill created the position of special assistant to the chancellor for innovation and entrepreneurship to fuel its campuswide programs. Judith Cone, who holds that position, had previously worked with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which was an early supporter of campuswide entrepreneurship programs.
Most learning on campus, Ms. Cone notes, is done through disciplinary work, which she calls the heart and soul of a college education. Entrepreneurship classes and programs enhance that learning by making the student the “central actor” in a project, where they are expected to “move ideas forward.”
“You are forced to do work the way work really happens in the real world,” she says. “It’s not straightforward, it’s messy. If your project fails, we celebrate that. We talk about failure.”
Carolina’s efforts include competitions, accelerators, and new coursework, some of which is embedded in specific academic programs. The School of Journalism and Mass Communication, for example, created the Reese News Lab to test new ideas in the media industry.
Ivy League and liberal-arts colleges are also getting in on the act. Middlebury College is one of several that emphasize social entrepreneurship, a concept that has been promoted by organizations like Ashoka U, a nonprofit institution that helps colleges design programs for students who want to develop ventures with a social benefit, in fields like health and education.
Jonathan T. Isham, a Middlebury economics professor who teaches a course on social entrepreneurship, describes the term as a Trojan horse that “gets students excited” while encouraging them to think about how to live a meaningful life. “I don’t teach accounting, I don’t do business plans,” he says. “I want them to do something you can uniquely do at this age: ask those questions.”
Community colleges have adapted as well, with institutions in places such as Baltimore, Houston, and Miami, adding entrepreneurship courses and certificates to their curriculum.
That said, entrepreneurship programs tend to have more cachet, and more resources, at larger and wealthier institutions. Wayne R. Curtis, director of the Center for Urban Entrepreneurship at the University of the District of Columbia, was one of the few representatives from a predominantly minority-serving institution at a recent Ashoka U conference held in Washington. He is searching for a donor to start a business incubator on campus, which he estimates will cost $75,000.
Greg Kahn, GRAIN
Dean Chang (with tie), head of the Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the U. of Maryland, leads a weekly staff meeting in a space called the Garage.
Washington’s lower-income black neighborhoods, he says, need more examples of success. “How do you solve problems without a lot of resources? How do you get yourself out of a bind?” asks Mr. Curtis, who rose from working-class roots to a successful career at Fannie Mae. “I really want to make part of the culture here that everyone, not just the business school, has an entrepreneurial mind-set.”
Retired and working without pay, he’s determined to see the project through. Yet he’s had no luck in finding anyone to underwrite it. Meanwhile, he notes, neighboring Georgetown University received a $10-million donation last year from an alumna and her husband to create the Beeck Center for Social Impact & Innovation.
To skeptics, many entrepreneurship programs seem poorly thought out. “I don’t think universities really know what they’re doing,” says Dileep Rao, a clinical professor in the department of management and international business at Florida International University.
Mr. Rao, whose previous career focused on business development, says it’s unrealistic to imagine that one or two classes will help a student become more entrepreneurial. More troubling, he says, is the notion that in some of these classes students are told that corporations seek employees with an entrepreneurial mind-set. Large companies welcome neither risk nor failure, and teaching students otherwise is naïve. “Some of these people act like it’s Kumbaya time,” he says.
He prefers to teach a more-concrete set of skills, which he calls new-business development. A less sexy term, perhaps, but it sticks to core business concepts, including product development, sales, and marketing.
Some student entrepreneurs also give the more-general classes mixed reviews. Ms. Burnett applauds Maryland’s efforts to engage students but says she learned far more at Startup Shell and in helping create the university’s first Bitcamp hackathon than she did in an introductory course on entrepreneurship through a program called Fearless Founders. Yet she does like a business class she’s taking now on financing start-ups, where she’s learning about venture capital and angel investors.
“The classroom does play an important role,” she says. “But what that is, they haven’t quite figured out yet.”
Hannah Salwen, a senior at NYU who began a business as an undergraduate, credits a social-entrepreneurship class for sparking the idea. But the venture really took off after she and her partner entered an eight-month-long competition through the Stern School of Business. She is now a part-time student working full time on their peer-to-peer high-tech equipment rental service. “School can seem so abstract and sometimes irrelevant,” she admits, but without the Leslie eLab and all of the other support the university has provided, she doubts she would have become an entrepreneur in the first place.
Some professors worry that focusing on entrepreneurship gives students an exaggerated sense of their own power, particularly among a generation inclined to see technology as an all-purpose solution to the world’s problems. At the Ashoka conference, several professors asked whether encouraging students to design their own ventures — like water purification systems and mobile libraries — sidesteps requiring them to grapple with the social, political, and economic issues that create the problems students are trying to tackle, like tainted water supplies and underfinanced schools.
The response, both at the conference and among entrepreneurship educators, tends to be a variation of: Let students try, and perhaps fail. Then their eyes will open to the bigger problems facing society.
Ms. Cone, of Chapel Hill, agrees that students can get locked into their limited experiences. “So many student ideas seem the same,” she says of entrepreneurship programs she’s seen. “I don’t think we’re challenging them.”
The university has attempted to broaden students’ understanding of society’s problems by bringing in speakers from the community to discuss what local residents really need — and it’s not another 3 a.m. pizza-delivery system, she says. Instead, students are asked to think about how they might help people in wheelchairs reach the thermostat or provide families in low-income neighborhoods access to fresh foods.
Greg Kahn, GRAIN
Mackenzie Burnett is executive director of Startup Shell, a student-run incubator at the U. of Maryland at College Park.
Whether you can teach someone to become a successful entrepreneur is open to debate. Skeptics note that the high failure rate of new businesses and the rarity of blockbuster start-ups, like Facebook, indicate how difficult the challenge is.
In fact, our start-up-obsessed culture notwithstanding, the percentage of young people who are creating new businesses is lower today than it was in the mid-1990s. Some researchers wonder whether increased student debt is to blame, as college graduates go in search of a steady paycheck. Others note that a stagnant economy has constrained young people’s ability to gain work experience, which is often necessary before they’re ready to create their own ventures. (The average first-time entrepreneur is actually closer to 40 than 20.)
Whatever the challenges start-ups face, advocates argue that counting how many of them graduates produce is the wrong measure of success for entrepreneurship programs.
“I’m not here to tell you how to teach people to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates,” says Frank Rimalovski, executive director of the NYU Entrepreneurial Institute and a former venture capitalist. “But we can teach them how to go out in the market and assess needs and opportunities and map them to a business model and get started. Yes, I’m pretty confident we can teach people how to do that.”
“The study of entrepreneurship can be as intellectual as anything else on campus.”
He and other educators note, too, that only a fraction of students who pass through their doors have a burning desire to start a business. More often, they are working with undergraduates who are intrigued by start-up or tech culture and find the idea of experimentation exciting in a way that textbook learning is not. In that sense, these instructors are not too different from professors who talk about building critical-thinking skills.
While educators agree there’s no one way to teach entrepreneurship — one lecturer likens it to improvisational jazz — they see common weaknesses, including lack of context, overreliance on storytelling, and the tendency to reduce complex processes to a list of simple steps.
“The study of entrepreneurship can be as intellectual as anything else on campus,” says Ross Levine, who holds the Willis H. Booth Chair in Banking and Finance in the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. Math, economics, politics, and history are all integral to the field. Yet, he adds, “its current manifestation is too often geared toward, How do you start a business in 2015 in California?”
Ms. Schneider of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, says this will be the defining challenge of entrepreneurship programs. Hands-on, real-world experiences are an important component for a 21st-century education, she says, but students also need a broad-based education, one “that asks hard questions about where we are, what it means, and what we’re going to do about it.”
“If you see change as a matter of technical facility,” she says, “you can be certain your results are going to be pretty thin.”
Entrepreneurship at 3 Campuses
Many colleges now offer undergraduate entrepreneurship programs. Some focus on particular fields while others are broader. Here are examples at a few campuses.
A ‘Differentiator’ for Science Students at Carthage College
Carthage has been offering ScienceWorks, an entrepreneurship program for students in the natural sciences, since 1994. Set up as a minor, the program covers a range of topics, including communication skills, financial and project management, and intellectual-property issues. Seniors develop a business plan for their core project.
“The engineering people have been doing this for a long time, but the science community doesn’t have that pipeline into industry,” says Douglas N. Arion, a professor of entrepreneurship and of physics and astronomy, who helped develop the program. “Now they’re waking up to it.”
Students who have been through the program do well in the job market, Mr. Arion says. “It’s a differentiator for them from other grads.”
Support for Social Innovators at Brown U.
Brown created the Social Innovation Initiative in 2007 to train and support students who want to pursue ventures with a social benefit, whether starting their own or working for an existing organization. The university offers courses, mentoring, internships, and other activities, and it also awards fellowships.
Each year Brown selects between 15 and 20 fellows, who receive up to $4,000 and take a year of coursework and skills training in addition to completing a 10-week summer project. Fellows have worked to support small businesses in developing countries, engage millennials in politics, and improve health care in low-income communities.
The initiative has been particularly successful, says Alan Harlam, director of innovation and social entrepreneurship at the Swearer Center for Public Service, because it fits the interest of many Brown undergraduates, about one third of whom go on to work in public service.
An Entrepreneurship Degree at Houston Community College
Houston Community College has long had close ties to the city’s businesses, but it only recently began to develop a track for students who want to become entrepreneurs. It will begin its first associate degree in entrepreneurship this fall and is developing tailored entrepreneurship certificate programs in some fields.
These programs are not just for students who want to start a business, says Maya Durnovo, chief entrepreneurial-initiatives officer for the system, which has 70,000 students. “Those skills are cutting across so many different industries because people want employees to think innovatively and creatively and not wait for someone to give them instructions,” she says. The college sponsors business workshops and competitions, and it just started a contest focused on social entrepreneurship. Ms. Durnovo hopes these efforts will become a steppingstone for students interested in pursuing bachelor’s or master’s degrees in entrepreneurship.
Beth McMurtrie writes about campus culture, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
