Honor roll: by teaching everything from planning to perseverance, the schools in our 3rd annual top 100 colleges and universities give their students a competitive advantage in the real world

Entrepreneur, April, 2005 by Mark Henricks

More than 80 years after the first entrepreneurship education program began at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and a decade or so since such programs mushroomed into the thousands, it's clear that entrepreneur ship can be taught. But are those who study it more likely to become entrepreneurs? And will they be more successful than other business students?

As part of Entrepreneur's 2005 rankings of the nation's university entrepreneurship programs, we posed those questions to directors and professors at top-level entrepreneurship education centers across the country. Alumni entrepreneurs of some programs were also asked whether their education had made a difference. The answers across the board were overwhelmingly positive.

That may come as a relief to entrepreneurial-minded students, but it still leaves one question unanswered: Where should they go to get that entrepreneurship education? Entrepreneur's annual rankings, now in their third year, help provide the answer.

This year saw some additions to the ranking's variables, according to David Newton, professor of entrepreneurial finance at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, and founder and president of Tech-Knowledge Point Corp., the new-venture research firm that compiles and analyzes the data for the rankings. Programs with multiple entrepreneurship centers for microenterprises, women-owned firms, technology transfer or other specialties were allowed to provide separate descriptions. Adjunct professors--typically experienced entrepreneurs from outside academia--were counted as faculty. New course titles were added as entrepreneurship education offerings expanded. And Newton began distinguishing between business plan competitions that offer modest cash prizes and those that give winners access to financiers with the possibility of significant funding.

In the rankings, the University of South Carolina, Columbia, moved up from the second quartile of national comprehensive programs to the top quartile, while the University of California, Berkeley, slipped from the first to the third quartile. Regional comprehensive programs saw more changes as four formerly top-ranked programs--Ball State University; California State University, Fresno; Iowa State University; and Marquette University--fell to the second quartile. Moving into the top quartile were Brigham Young University, North Carolina State University, University of Colorado at Denver and University of Illinois at Chicago.

Some schools moved up in the rankings thanks to higher scores boosted by one-time events such as a win in a national business plan competition. Others implemented long-term additions to their programs with new classes, faculty or creative initiatives such as outreach programs to attract new students. According to Newton, the University of South Carolina, Columbia, for example, "has really been on the move the past several years in terms of expanding, upgrading and doing some innovative things in their entrepreneurship program."

EDUCATION'S LASTING EFFECTS

One variable Newton doesn't analyze, however, is how effective schools are at developing entrepreneurs who start successful businesses. That's because few schools do a good job of tracking students after they leave. "We've had thousands of students go through, and it's hard to state with any accuracy the results of the program," says Raman Chadha, executive director of the entrepreneurship center at Chicago's DePaul University.

There is no shortage of anecdotal evidence, however, as all schools can point to alums who have started and run successful ventures. That kind of evidence can turn skeptics into believers. "Originally, I had the viewpoint that it's difficult to teach entrepreneurship and have an impact on the likelihood that someone will become an entrepreneur," says Chadha. "But I've changed on that."

He'll get no argument from Jeffrey Betz. Betz and fellow students Cecilia Domingos, 27, and Michael Lobsinger, 33, invented, designed, manufactured and created a plan to sell attractively styled inflatable life jackets as part of an assignment in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's graduate entrepreneurship program. Today, 3-year-old Orca Gear Inc. of Troy, New York, is getting widespread praise for its products, and Betz, the 30-year-old COO, projects $1 million in 2005 sales.

"Our story definitely supports that you can learn entrepreneurship," says Betz, who earned his MBA in 2003. To get their product off the ground, the trio used cash won in business plan competitions for initial funding, tapped professors for consulting and got free help developing a prototype from local companies. "For the first two years, no one really charged us anything," Betz says.

Encouraging anecdotes like Betz's aren't the end of the story--while few programs can say for sure how many and what kind of entrepreneurs they produce, some have made the attempt. Iffekhar Hasan, acting dean and interim director of Rensselaer's entrepreneurship center, says that about I in 6 of its entrepreneurship graduates start and run businesses successful enough to attract significant funding. "Fifty percent of the students say they're going to start something," Hasan says. "But about 15 to 20 percent have successes three to five years after graduation."