The best time to become an entrepreneur is at university

A recent survey in the United States yielded intriguing statistics that carry implications for the entrepreneurs of tomorrow, not to mention the universities they might attend. The research, conducted by Junior Achievement and Citizens Financial Group, found that 61% of high school students would rather start a business than have a traditional job.

But of the 1,000 13- to 18-year-old teenagers surveyed, only 41% agree that to get a good job they must have a four-year college degree.

As it happens, other research reinforces these findings about Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2013. They’re entrepreneurially oriented, with almost two-thirds (62%) saying they’ve either started businesses already or plan to do so. But once again, only 51% say they’re interested in pursuing a four-year degree, down dramatically from 70% merely three years ago.

College as a catalyst

The fact is, one of the best times to explore starting a business is while pursuing a college degree. Or, at least it should be. College should be a catalyst for students to discover their passions, build a network and gain new perspectives on the world – all factors critical to entrepreneurial success.

Granted, the history of modern business abounds with examples of entrepreneurs who either never attended college or dropped out before graduating, but who nevertheless succeeded spectacularly.

In just the last half century, this honour roll features Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, not to mention, among numerous others, the founders of Twitter, FitBit and WhatsApp. And here’s a gee-whiz metric: of the 400 individuals that Forbes listed in 2017 as the wealthiest in America, 17.5% – 70 people – never graduated from college.

So yes, high school students might believe that they can pull off the same coups as any recent tech titan. Like those enterprising geniuses, students may feel that they can find out what it’s like to start a business only if they leave the campus. We saw this first hand during the height of the COVID pandemic. As the tech founders we spoke to told us, they had never before seen so many college students take a semester off from school to intern with a start-up.

Barriers to entrepreneurial behaviour

Those students could just as readily have explored the workplace while still in college. But here’s the problem: many of the aspiring entrepreneurs drop out of higher education because the educational system can be counterproductive to the very behaviour essential to successful entrepreneurship in the first place. The most basic needs for developing an entrepreneurial mindset – to take risks, to leverage the freedom to experiment and fail – often go unmet.

Students should get an educational experience that dovetails with the entrepreneurial experience. College should be less about getting high grades and more about gaining hands-on, real-world experience – outside classroom walls – that represents the most practical of educations. The traditional approach to educating entrepreneurs can be wrong for some entrepreneurs who are anything but traditional by nature.

What to do? It’s time for higher education globally to do a better job of making the case to the next generation of students as well as to the business community that the best time for aspiring entrepreneurs to create and build a new venture is while they’re still in a university.

It should do its utmost to establish, maintain and cultivate an ecosystem in which its entrepreneurial-minded students can function not only as students but also as future creators and risk-takers. It’s like a baseball player performing in the minor leagues before getting called up to the majors, or a theatrical performance doing a trial run in Boston before making it to Broadway.

Complementary priorities

Towards that end, we should modify the standard schematic dictating that education automatically precedes career, and overcome the belief that this is a sequence to be followed loyally. Rather, we should engineer our universities to deliver both experiences – the educational and the occupational – simultaneously and seamlessly. And we must build stronger partnerships with industry.

At Lehigh@Nasdaq Center, an education-industry partnership between Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center in San Francisco, students often express the desire to start a business or work in a start-up while pursuing a degree. It’s time we recognised these priorities as complementary rather than conflicting.

The Silicon Valley Innovation Internship is an example. Students intern remotely on a project with a start-up that can be located anywhere in the world – such as Germany or South Africa. They log 10 to 15 hours of work a week and connect with Silicon Valley business leaders in a weekly class session.

In the process, they gain professional experience, acquire valuable skills and learn about entrepreneurship at an accelerated rate. They thereby test the waters of a potential career through a trial run while earning credits toward a degree and building their CV.

At the heart of higher education

The bottom line: entrepreneurship should occupy the very heart of the higher education experience. How so? First, the principles behind the best entrepreneurship education should serve as a model that can be applied to the higher education system as a whole. Students should be encouraged to take risks, be allowed the freedom to fail and be propelled to break down boundaries across disciplines.

Second, higher education globally should integrate learning-by-doing into the academic experience, thereby enabling students to explore career paths creatively – and entrepreneurially.

Third, if higher education is to better prepare the entrepreneurs of tomorrow, it should work more closely with the start-up community.

Only then will higher education better prepare students for the future of work, but also stay ahead of the curve. It will enrol the next generation – now so keen to start businesses, but reluctant to pursue a college degree – and enable new talent to discover how to do it.

Samantha Dewalt is managing director of the Lehigh@Nasdaq Center, an education-industry partnership between Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center in San Francisco, USA.