Entrepreneurs and college have had an "it's complicated" relationship for quite some time. In fact, the entrepreneur who's famous for making that phrase famous, was a college drop out.
College drop-outs becoming entrepreneurial successes is a pretty common story. And for good reason. A list of recent companies whose founders dropped out of college is pretty extraordinary and includes: Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Twitter, Oracle, Uber, Whole Foods and, of course, Facebook.
Seeing this, a growing number of colleges are, according to the New York Times, making big bets on fancy efforts to not only lure entrepreneurship-minded students to campus, but keep them there. "We want Rice to be one of the schools at the top of the list of schools that prospective students with entrepreneurial aspirations say would be a good place to realize their ambitions," said David W. Leebron, Rice's president told the Times. "This is a nontrivial group of students, some of the smartest students, the most creative students."
There's nothing inherently wrong with universities investing more money in entrepreneurship facilities and programs to help future entrepreneurs "realize their ambitions." Having those bright, creative students enrolled is probably good for the schools. So long as their programs are project based, and not purely classroom and lecture based, and their facilities are designed to allow for collaboration, there's little doubt the experience will benefit the students as well.
Even so, there are four problems which universities in this entrepreneurship arms race, as the Times put it, should consider before investing even more in their entrepreneurship armaments. They may even want to rethink the investments altogether.
The first challenge is that many of the characteristics that make entrepreneurs successful are the very things that make traditional college learning environments challenging for them. Creative and out of the box thinking as well as impatient temperaments have been shown to be shared characteristics of many successful entrepreneurs yet can be liabilities in college. Said another way, the qualities that make good students don't always translate well to entrepreneurship. Many round entrepreneur pegs are out of place in square-holed schools. If these future entrepreneurs need to get into colleges in order to get these benefits, they may never get there.
That's not news. Thomas Edison, perhaps the nation's foremost innovator and entrepreneur, didn't finish school. And that connection hasn't abated - as evidenced by the billion dollar companies listed above.
The second challenge for university leaders seeking to make college more appealing to future entrepreneurs is that the lure of the non-college track is enticing, faster to market, avoids the 'not insignificant" tuition costs and in some ways is easier easier, than ever.
It was not too long ago that venturing off campus and into the marketplace was a perilous undertaking. But now, many young entrepreneurs willing to put off or put aside college are finding eager supporters and investors - growing communities of speculative financiers and funds with capital to invest and wisdom to share. Both investor and entrepreneur alike have been motivated by the flood of spectacular riches and unicorn valuations of dozens of recent startups. In this climate, everyone believes they are the next Zuckerberg or Gates - drop outs with the multi-billion dollar game plan.
And some are. "College is and was a great experience but we didn't think we could literally afford to pass on the opportunity to start our company," Jonathan Lacoste told me. Jonathan and his college roommate co-founder, Tom Coburn, dropped out of Boston College in 2011 to found Jebbit - the leading post-click marketing software. Jebbit attracted more than 3.3 million dollars in investment and has built an impressive client list from Presidential campaigns to footwear companies. "I don't encourage anyone to leave college. At the same time, college is one opportunity and there can be other, more appealing business opportunities for some entrepreneurs."
Perhaps better entrepreneurship programs and facilities would have kept Lacoste and Coburn in school. But it's not as simple as having a startup on one hand and an education on the other. And that's the third problem - there are many many non-college based entrepreneurship programs that are now designed and marketed to be educational alternatives to college.
These programs, usually accelerator and incubators, are growing from coast to coast and offer compressed, hands-on training in startup business tactics - like a bootcamps. In these programs, the 'students' learn by working to grow their own real companies. And many accelerators also come with pretty appealing perks such as cash investments - in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Don Burton co-founded EDGE, a New York City accelerator that funded companies and educates entrepreneurs in the growing education technology (edtech) sector. Burton compares his accelerator to getting an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He may know; he has one from there.
"Accelerators like ours are the future of learning," Burton told me. "Unlike most college programs, our students are hyper-motivated to learn because they know the future of their companies depends on not just learning but correctly applying that knowledge. It's learning on steroids." And these entrepreneurship alternatives to college, like accelerators, are in high demand. "We accepted just ten companies in EDGE this year," Burton said. "Those ten came from more than 500 applicants. That's a lower acceptance rate than Harvard or Stanford."
When you start with the idea that entrepreneurs may not be traditional "good classroom students" in the first place and add an army of eager investors at the ready and growing entrepreneurship education competition, it's not a rosy picture for colleges seeking to entice entrepreneurs to hit the books. The fight may be so lopsided already that new campus lab spaces and college entrepreneurship programs may not make a sizable impact on which students come to or stay at a school.
But there is another, more serious, reason that colleges should rethink pouring school resources into new startup perks for prospective student entrepreneurs - those efforts may be undermining the idea of entrepreneurship itself. By focusing on how to attract and cater to startup-minded entrepreneurs, colleges are confusing what entrepreneurship is.
Entrepreneurship is about igniting a mind, not launching a startup. Entrepreneurship is a mindset - not an occupation. Entrepreneurs can be in any line of work from car repair to library management. In fact, when we teach young people the basics of the entrepreneurial mindset we tell them explicitly that it's not about starting a business.
Colleges know this; the entrepreneurial mindset has been a basis of academic study for decades now. It is a disservice to those who've studied and taught entrepreneurship to conflate startup culture with learning to be an entrepreneur. The two are related but not nearly the same. Entrepreneurs - those who understand and use the entrepreneurial mindset - add real value to society by driving innovation, change and efficiency in whatever they do.
University making investments in entrepreneurship facilities and programs may do better for entrepreneurs and their schools by investing at least as vigorously in ongoing research into how the entrepreneurial mindset can be best taught and learned across all sectors - not just the startup one.