Entrepreneurship Education Comes of Age on Campus: The Challenges and Rewards of Bringing Entrepreneurship to Higher Education

Abstract

As the Kauffman Campus Initiative reaches its conclusion, we at the Foundation see an opportunity to take a first cut at distilling the lessons learned from the widespread, but variegated, adoption of entrepreneurship education. As part of this effort, we solicited the views of academics and administrators at sixteen institutions with notable entrepreneurship education programs — some of them “Kauffman Campuses,” some not — to discuss common practices and challenges. (Participating people and institutions are listed in appendix I.) In addition to gathering written submissions, we spent a day in four sessions of directed conversation about what is going well and not so well in their worlds. The themes, questions, and choices they discussed, plus the judgments and analysis of Foundation staff and others who were consulted along the way, are distilled here.

This paper’s methodology is deliberately qualitative. We make no effort to conduct a statistical census or a comprehensive survey of the field (which would be a formidable undertaking). The goal of this paper is simply to lay groundwork for a discussion of the state of entrepreneurship education as it leaves adolescence, so to speak, and enters its prime. We seek to clarify choices; to reflect on emerging norms and on successes and failures; to provide guidance for new entrants; and, above all, to spark a conversation about the next phase.

Keywords: entrepreneurship education, higher education, Kauffman campus, college, university