Belmont University

We've Come a Long Way

The New York Times has a story that shows just how far entrepreneurship has come in the past twenty-five years.

Undergraduate courses in how to start and run a small business are becoming as ubiquitous as Economics 101. Gone is the conventional wisdom that running a small business cannot be learned by sitting in a classroom.

According to the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Mo., more than 2,000 colleges and universities now offer at least a class and often an entire course of study in entrepreneurship. That is up from 253 institutions offering such courses in 1985. More than 200,000 students are enrolled in such courses, compared with 16,000 in 1985.

I first started teaching as a graduate student in 1981 and had my first full-time teaching position in 1982. Although I helped to launch an entrepreneurship program where I taught, it met with significant resistance from faculty, parents and even many students. I left in teaching in 1988 in part because I was frustrated by how resistant business schools were to teaching entrepreneurship and small business.

Entrepreneurship education come a long way in a short time when you consider the glacial pace of change in academia.

(Thanks to soon to be alumnae of Belmont and aspiring social entrepreneur, Janice Dotti, for passing this along).


Posted by Jeff Cornwall on May 1, 2008 06:07 AM |

Comments

Jeff, your pathway and mine are quite similar. I started my academic career and actual small business formation simultaneously. Out of a desire to bring both social and commercial change we organized “food co-opts,” “collaborative day-care centers,” and a “record co-opt” for the purposes of providing quality and diversity of goods and services to low-income people in university and college town. As our success rates increased we, the various founders, expanded to develop formal business plans and business models for new emerging enterprises. It wasn’t until a colleague called me an “entrepreneur” that I really began to study the academic field in 1980. By that time I had probably contributed to a dozen new ventures and written 50 business plans. It is amazing how knowledge production and knowledge diffusion has expanded entrepreneurship education is this time period.

Birdied by: Peter Hackbert | May 2, 2008 07:51 AM

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