10 Best Entrepreneurship Courses of 2011

Ace! NewsFlash

University courses in entrepreneurship are better—more useful, more real, more likely to produce actual companies—than they have ever been. Here are 10 we’d love to take.

From the April 2011 issue of Inc. magazine

Angels in Training  The students in this class at Willamette University have $100,000 to spend financing new businesses.

Stanford's new entrepreneurship class is not for the faint of heart. Launchpad is designed around a series of hurdles: the elevator pitch, the functional prototype, week after week of sales results. After each hurdle, students are force-ranked, so someone always lands on the bottom. Midway through the semester, the class stages a trade show at which venture capitalists stroll around writing fictitious checks. Some students make out like bandits, while others are publicly stiffed. For the lesson on presentation skills, a television news crew is invited to record three-minute segments about the aspiring entrepreneurs' companies. Students feverishly practice and polish. Then the reporter shows up. "Sorry," she says, "I can only give you each 30 seconds." Panic, mad cutting, and humiliating performances ensue.

Oh, and all the companies are real, because students incorporate within the first two weeks. So failure is never just academic. "It's all about building up your tolerance for risk," saysPerry Klebahn, an associate consulting professor who, together with professor Michael Dearing, designed and teaches Launchpad. "Entrepreneurship does not require an IQ. You just need to be able to fail, learn, compost, and move forward."

The ubiquitous assertion "You can't teach entrepreneurship" was probably accurate back when schools fielded chiefly sterile exercises in business-plan writing. But increasingly, universities are devising innovative classes that emphasize experience over study and seek teaching moments in misery, messiness, and unpredictability. Academic concepts like effectuation—which emphasizes entrepreneurial ingenuity and improvisation—and a new, dynamic approach to business modeling are among the ideas drawing professors toward a fluid style of pedagogy that feels more like life. Often it is life; students may emerge with embryonic companies in addition to their grades.

Following is a portfolio of 10 outstanding entrepreneurship classes, distinguished by their excellence (most have won awards or been adopted by other schools), their innovation, and their ambition. You won't, by the way, find the excellent Launchpad on the list, but that is only because we chose another Stanford course instead, and we wanted to limit ourselves to one course per school. We also wanted to avoid overlap of focus, so the list includes, for example, only one class on developing new technologies, though our research identified several that are excellent. With more room, we could easily list another two dozen classes, among them The Founder's Journey at MIT, Virtual Enterprise at City University of New York, and Markets in Human Hope at the University of Virginia. For aspiring founders with questions about the value of entrepreneurship education, the answer is clear: The modern classroom definitely has something to offer.

Best Courses 2011: Founders' Dilemmas at Harvard Business School

Most entrepreneurship classes chase the strategy-innovation-finance trifecta. But people problems cause more than 60 percent of new-venture failures, research shows. Founders' Dilemmas dissects the people decisions entrepreneurs face at critical junctures—particularly in the beginning. Read more

Best Courses 2011: Technology Venturing at Ohio State

The inventor-entrepreneur is a romantic figure. But plenty of companies thrive by commercializing the inventions of others. Technology Venturing builds businesses around sophisticated technologies that have not yet found commercial uses. Read more

Best Courses 2011: Foundations of Managing and Entrepreneurship at Babson College

Marketing, finance, operations, and HR can be studied separately. Entrepreneurship encompasses them all. So Babson College, a business-oriented school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, introduces its entire freshman class to the subject of business by having students start one. Read more

Best Courses 2011: Mayfield Fellows at Stanford University

Each year, a dozen Stanford students get front-row seats for business drama at its most compelling. Mayfield Fellows spend a third of their nine-month class interning in young Silicon Valley companies, where "anything you can imagine happening in a high-growth, high-impact company has happened," says Tina Seelig, executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. (Seelig teaches the class with Tom Byers, who created it in 1996 and is the program's academic director.) "We've had changes of leadership, patent disputes, moving into new buildings. Last summer, a company went public. One year, we had two companies go out of business." Read more

Best Courses 2011: Entrepreneurial Selling at the University of Chicago

Though marketing courses are legion in business schools, sales classes are hen's-teeth rare. That's one reason Craig Wortmann's class feels so refreshing. Read more

Best Courses 2011: The Launch Pad at the University of Miami

Some entrepreneurship classes live in business schools. Some live in engineering schools. The University of Miami's Launch Pad lives in the career center. "When students come in to talk about 'What should I do when I graduate?,' we advise them to think about their careers along a continuum, from working for someone else to starting their own business," says William Green, dean of undergraduate education. "Instead of treating entrepreneurship as something you do instead of a job, we treat it as a job." Read more

Best Courses 2011: Sustainable Product and Market Development for Subsistence Marketplaces at the University of Illinois

Both the socially conscious and the profit-minded see opportunity in a global market of up to four billion people living in poverty. Yet in most entrepreneurship classes, financially comfortable students develop products for customers who look a lot like themselves. Read more

Best Courses 2011: New Ventures at Willamette University

Investors excel at sizing up entrepreneurial companies, because they see so many.Rob Wiltbank wants students similarly exposed. So while half his M.B.A. candidates at Willamette, a small liberal-arts school in Salem, Oregon, are launching start-ups, the rest are evaluating start-ups while embedded with angel groups. "We are learning entrepreneurship from both sides of the table," says Wiltbank, an associate professor at Willamette. Read more

Best Courses 2011: NUvention at Northwestern University

Most entrepreneurs possess deep knowledge of their industries. So why shouldn't entrepreneurship classes be just as specialized? That's the logic behind NUvention, a group of classes that focuses on three verticals: medical devices, energy, and Internet businesses. Read more

Best Courses 2011: SU's Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans With Disabilities

Michael Haynie wouldn't dream of reality-checking his students with the possibility of failure. He teaches disabled veterans, whose confidence was shattered along with their bodies. "Our challenge is twofold," says Haynie, an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Syracuse University. "We must give them the tool kit to start a company and help them believe they can succeed." Read more

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Applications to Harvard, Columbia etc Surge to All-Time Highs

Ace! NewsFlash

A pedestrian walks past the Harvard University Business School in Boston, Massachusetts.

Applications for undergraduate admissions to Harvard University and Columbia University rose to all-time highs, making it harder than ever before to get into the colleges.

Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, received almost 35,000 applications for the next academic year, a 15 percent increase from 30,489 for the current year, William Fitzsimmons, dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid, said today in a statement. Applications to Columbia, in New York, rose 32 percent to a 34,587, from 26,179 a year earlier, according to a statement today.

Harvard admitted 6.9 percent of applicants last year, and Columbia 9 percent. The most-selective colleges are setting application records because students are seeking a chance at “the luxury brands of higher education,” said David Hawkins, director of public policy and research at the National Association for College Admission Counseling in Arlington, Virginia.

“If you want to be seen in a Mercedes, you have to go buy one,” Hawkins said in an interview. “If you want to be seen as a Harvard student, you pay the application fee and take your chance. As more students are performing better academically in high school, they are taking their shots.”

Harvard is the richest university in the U.S., with an endowment of $27.4 billion last June 30. It is a member of the Ivy League, a group of eight universities in the northeast U.S.

‘Global Awareness’

Behind the surge at Columbia, also an Ivy League member, were outreach efforts, “global awareness of Columbia’s reputation,” and New York’s drawing power, Jessica Marinaccio, dean of undergraduate admissions at Columbia, said in the statement. She said the university for the first time used the Common Application, a form accepted by more than 400 institutions and helps high school students apply to multiple colleges.

Columbia rose to fourth place from eighth in the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of top U.S. academic research institutions. Harvard took the top spot in the rankings, which were released in August.

Columbia, founded in 1754, counts among its undergraduate alumni U.S. President Barack Obama, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.

Applications at Stanford University near Palo Alto, California, climbed 6.8 percent to 34,200 from 32,022 a year ago, Bob Patterson, director of admission, said yesterday in an interview.

Penn, Northwestern

The University of Pennsylvania, the Ivy League member in Philadelphia, received a record 30,800 applications for undergraduate admission, according to a statement on Jan. 6. Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said in a statement on Jan. 10 that 30,605 students, the most ever, sought undergraduate admission.

Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire; the University of Chicago; Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge; and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, also received record numbers of undergraduate applications, according to statements this month.

The percentage of students applying to 7 or more colleges almost doubled to 23 percent in 2009 from 12 percent a decade earlier, according the Cooperative Institutional Research Program’s Freshman Survey. Each year, about 500,000 students participate in the survey, administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Hedging Bets

As colleges receive more applications, the admit rates go down, and students are hedging their bets by applying to more schools, said Linda DeAngelo, assistant director for research at the Institute. The ease of applying online has also increased the number of applications, she said.

Harvard’s record total may be attributed to the university’s new school of engineering and applied science, the ease of applying online and financial-aid policies, Fitzsimmons said in the statement.

In 2007, Harvard said that most families making $180,000 a year or less would pay no more than 10 percent of their income toward college costs. The college is free to students whose families earn $60,000 or less in annual income.

The cost to attend Harvard for the 2010-2011 academic year is $50,724, according to the university. Harvard was established in 1636. About 6,650 undergraduates are among the total of about 21,000 students, said Jeff Neal, a spokesman.

Harvard counts among its alumni Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, both graduates of the university’s law school.

Bloomberg 15 Jan 2011

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How U-Chicago became a hot college

Ace! NewsFlash

The University of Chicago is hardly a well-kept secret. Arguably the pre-eminent private university in the Midwest, U of C enjoys a reputation as a destination for smart students who want to work very, very hard.

It was something of a surprise, then, when U of C saw applications rise 42 percent in a single year, probably the largest bump at any nationally ranked university. Admissions at the Hyde Park campus had progressed in orderly fashion throughout the last decade, from about 8,000 applications in 2002 to about 9,500 in 2006 to about 12,000 in 2008. This year, applications swelled to 19,370. That's twice the number who applied four years ago. And it came without any loss of "yield," the share of admitted students who actually enroll. The university's admission rate has plummeted from 39 percent in 2006 to 18 percent today.

(To lend some context, U of C's admit rate has now eclipsed that of neighboring Northwestern University, whose own acceptance rate has gone from 30 percent in 2006 to 23 percent in 2010. Admit rates are declining by a rate of about one point a year in the industry as a whole.)

U of C President Robert Zimmer was asked about his banner year in a recent interview at the Willard Hotel. "I think, to be honest, we're just doing a better job in talking about the university," he said. The university has been marketing itself and recruiting students like never before, trying to reach pockets of students around the nation who are a natural fit for the cerebral university but who may not have thought to apply. Those kids have always been out there, and many of them already applied to U of C, Zimmer said: "We're simply making an effort to reach more of them."

There is also the Obama factor: Hyde Park, the South Side neighborhood the president calls home, has never been more visible. Before his candidacy, even some Chicagoans couldn't tell you how to get there. (Trust me; I was born just south of there, on 76th Street.)

But perhaps the most significant change is U of C's embrace of the Common Application two years ago. This is a big deal. Chicago was among the last highly competitive colleges to eschew the Common App (Georgetown is another). Indeed, U of C stood for years in sharp defiance to the generic, one-size-fits-all application and called its own form the Uncommon Application.

The Common App simplifies the application process for students, who can fill out the form once and submit it five or 10 or 20 times, saving their creative energies for the supplementary essays required by individual colleges. Colleges that switch to the Common App tend to see applications surge, as the University of Virginia found when it embraced the form two years ago.

The downside: the Common App makes it easier for students to apply to 10 or 15 (or 20 or 30) schools, dividing their loyalty and sapping college yields.

Ted O'Neill, longtime admissions dean at U of C, was no great fan of the Common App. He loved the Uncommon Application and the opportunity to ask "uncommon questions." One crop of applicants were asked, for example, "What would you do with a foot-and-a-half-tall jar of mustard?"

O'Neill is gone now. (Officially, he has retired. According to Inside Higher Ed, the Common App may have been forced on him.) Zimmer contends what O'Neill prized was the uniqueness of the Uncommon Application. That, he said, has not been lost. There are still distinctive essay questions (students append them to the Common App) that distinguish U of C -- and its applicants -- from the crowd. One current essay option is, "How did you get caught? (Or not caught, as the case may be.)" Zimmer: "The main feature that was distinctive about our application was the set of essays that I would say were stimulating and challenging." That feature, he said, is "exactly the same."

There are obvious reasons for any college to adopt the Common App, particularly if you are a first-rank national university with an acceptance rate that -- at 40 percent -- might have looked a bit lackluster to industry observers and compilers of collegiate rankings. According to Zimmer, U of C moved to the Common App primarily as a convenience to students, and particularly to reach a population of students from low-income families who are said to favor the generic application. "There is an encouraging amount of flexibility in the Common Application," Zimmer said.

Students protested the coming demise of the Uncommon Application four years ago. Now, of course, those students are gone, and the current crop of students were not unhappy seeing the university's admission rate dip into the teens for the first time.

*** Ace! is a member of the EducationUSA global educational advising network affiliated with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. We provide free EducationUSA counseling services to students in the northern provinces of Thailand; our faculty of U.S.-trained Test Prep Experts can help you with cost-effective result-driven training programs for SAT-1, SAT-2, TOEFL, GRE, GMAT, GED, AP, IB, TOEIC, IELTS etc ***