PhD Update: Entrepreneurship, Students, and Universities

I am in the final month of my dissertation at George Mason University. This blog grew out of my early research, as did the twitter handle Campus_Entre. I’ve learned a great deal and am happy with the database of high growth student entrepreneurs, their firms, and schools, as well as the case study of the University of Chicago. 

I also developed basic campus ‘pathways’ based on themes that emerged from the qualitative and quantitative data collected.

The question of whether the campus offers frontier attributes (liberty, diversity, and assets) is the center of this research. This portion of the paper uses the ideas of Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis.

Moreover, if the campus does in fact offer frontier attributes and supports ‘frontier outcomes (new norms, innovative products, new organizations, and socio-economic change), how can we replicate these attributes in other organizations, institutions and sectors?

ACE Supports So Called Disruptions in Higher Education Business Models | Inside Higher Ed

I love studying/being part of higher education right now. It is the perfect confluence of my startup experiences/business education and my PhD research and teaching/work at the Mason Center for Social Entrepreneurship. I am by no means part of the industry elite — never been to an ACE event or even a traditional academic conference — but I do enjoy reading about them. From Paul Fain at Inside Higher Ed:

The council says it wants more students to earn college credit for learning that occurs outside the college classroom. Some of these credit pathways are trendy and new; others have been around for decades. But interest in prior learning assessment has grown rapidly, particularly during the last six months, and ACE is riding the wave.

ACE’s leaders say they are giving a boost to alternative credit pathways because of the college “completion agenda,” work force development and money worries that are buffeting colleges.“We are experiencing a confluence of forces of change,” Molly Broad, the council’s president, recently told the University of Wisconsin System’s Board of Regents. “All of this coming together is persuasive that business as usual is not in the future cards and we must innovate.

“While it’s known primarily as a lobby and membership group, ACE, whose annual meeting opened Sunday, has long had a hand in prior learning assessment. The council started issuing credit recommendations for military service shortly after World War II, and added the assessment of corporate training programs for credit in 1974. These days students can get transcripts for ACE’s credit recommendations for $20 a pop. The council has issued 63,000 credit transcripts since 2001.

The article goes on to explain in great detail the recent, large push towards awarding credits for ‘alternative’ learning — ie work experience or MOOCs and a variety of other options.  Its an interesting debate and it underscores how much people still value degrees even with the push to self-led learning (Uncollege), dropping out, badges, and all of the other opportunities being presented to today’s learners.  Degree attainment is a policy goal of President Obama and many other leaders — whether it crosses a point of diminishing returns. But with technology, budget challenges, debt reflux, etc… its a really interesting time for higher education.

Btw, for many colleges these alternative credits could be a gold mine. Its kind of like Amazon.com’s marketplace — where Amazon.com plays host to a buyer and seller and collects basic fees, and often upsells both parties on more items/services. This business model is much more high margin (profitable) than Amazon actually stocking and selling things themselves.

Also, while we are talking Amazon, lets think Kindle/ebook model — digital products served on demand with few physical activities and interactions before, during or after the sale. MOOCs/distance are the proxy for higher education. Like the Amazon marketplace model, this model should be higher margin than traditional sales, distribution, delivery, and service — even compared to Amazon’s original model of selling books online only (which was radical at the time).

Enjoy Fain’s piece and let me know what ACE’s angle is?

via ACE doubles down on prior learning assessment | Inside Higher Ed.

New Master of Entrepreneurship Program | University of Michigan

The University of Michigan, a leader across many disciplines (and my alma mater) has announced the creation of a Master of Entrepreneurship. Its great to see it is a joint venture between business and engineering. I was fortunate to interview Michigan Alum and supporter Sam Zell a few months back and it was evident in our short talk that Michigan, its leaders, and supporters were fully aware of the interdisciplinary nature of entrepreneurship. This is a great development for Michigan and the practice, research, and teaching of entrepreneurship in higher education. From the Michigan Master of Entrepreneurship website:

The Michigan Master of Entrepreneurship (MsE) gives students the ability to create new technology-focused ventures, either as standalone entities or within established innovative organizations.

This instruction is not available through conventional business or engineering curricula. Most business schools focus on the skill set required in larger, more mature organizations. Most engineering programs do not include market assessment and commercialization skills. The MsE program brings these two cultures together in a novel synthesis that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The first students will begin in August 2012 and the application is available online. Go Blue! (I can write that, this is a blog!)

via Master of Entrepreneurship | University of Michigan.

Rabbi’s Farm School Seeks to Be University with $30 Mil Gift

Interesting story from the NYTimes that highlights the exceptional nature of higher education in America and the central role that philanthropy plays in the system. Delaware Valley College, in suburban Philadelphia, just took in a $30 million gift from a local foundation in order to transform itself from a small college into a university. The gift has more than doubled the endowment and the leaders plan to strategic deploy the new assets. From the article:

Del Val, as it is known, was founded by American Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf at the suggestion of writer Leo Tolstoy, according to college archives. Krauskopf met the author of “War and Peace” on an 1894 trip to Russia, during which Tolstoy said U.S. immigrants would be better off tilling soil than living in cramped industrial cities.

In 1896, Krauskopf bought 118 acres of land about 25 miles north of Philadelphia. The National Farm School, open to all faiths, began the following year with 10 students.

The school has since broadened its offerings to include subjects like biology, business and criminal justice. Today, more than half its 1,700 undergraduates are non-farming students — but the agrarian image persists.

“People think it’s just for ag. We’re trying to definitely move away from that,” said Del Val senior Dariyen Carter, 21, of Baltimore. “We really need to have a well-rounded institution.”

Brosnan’s strategic plan includes reorganizing the college’s 27 majors into three undergraduate schools; he also wants to add a doctoral and three more master’s programs to enable Del Val to seek university status from state and regional accreditation agencies.

So, as I often tell my entrepreneurship students, there are always opportunities for growth. Even when the economy is tanking and our policy makers are out of touch, there are opportunities. In a higher education marketplace full of moaning and groaning, Delaware Valley College has entered growth mode.

via With $30M Gift, Pa. College Seeks to Be University – NYTimes.com.

NYT on Making College Relevant

Interesting article on how what is taught in college/university is often determined by student choice. This has been going on for a long time (that was the goal of land grant universities) and Kate Zernike of the New Yorks Times has a contemporary spin on the evolution of higher education in America.

The “a-ha” moment for this piece is the death of philosophy departments and the study of classics. The rise of business and entrepreneurship in the academe is highlighted as well. It is an nteresting piece that a childhood friend/PhD Political Scientist shared on Facebook. Here is a snippet.

Consider the change captured in the annual survey by the University of California, Los Angeles, of more than 400,000 incoming freshmen. In 1971, 37 percent responded that it was essential or very important to be “very well-off financially,” while 73 percent said the same about “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.” In 2009, the values were nearly reversed: 78 percent identified wealth as a goal, while 48 percent were after a meaningful philosophy.

The shift in attitudes is reflected in a shifting curriculum. Nationally, business has been the most popular major for the last 15 years. Campuses also report a boom in public health fields, and many institutions are building up environmental science and just about anything prefixed with “bio.” Reflecting the new economic and global realities, they are adding or expanding majors in Chinese and Arabic. The University of Michigan has seen a 38 percent increase in students enrolling in Asian language courses since 2002, while French has dropped by 5 percent.

Of course, universities have always adjusted curriculum to reflect the changing world; Kim Wilcox, the provost and vice president for academic affairs at Michigan State, notes that universities, his included, used to offer majors in elocution and animal husbandry. In a major re-examination of its curriculum, Michigan State has added a dozen or so new programs, including degrees in global studies and, in response to a growing industry in the state, film studies. At the same time, it is abandoning underperformers like classical studies: in the last four years, only 13 students have declared it their major.

Glad to see the debate continues, but many leading institutions (as highlighted in the article) continue to respond to the demands of society as determined by societies values. This is part of what makes America’s system of higher education to global leader and source of great opportunity for those who venture there.

Higher Ed in W. Virgina is a Growth Industry

We often talk of the campus as a great place to launch a venture because it is a healthy marketplace — both in aggregate and in many specific niches. Here is some evidence from my neighbors in West Virginia.

A recent study by West Virginia’s Higher Education Policy committee shows great growth in enrollment year over year and over the past 5 years. According to a story by Walt Williams at Channel 13 WOWK,

Enrollment at the state’s colleges and universities hit an all-time high earlier this year, the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission announced Thursday.

A record 93,712 students were enrolled in West Virginia’s higher education institutions at the start of the fall 2009 semester, the commission said. This year marks the first time enrollment surpassed 90,000 students.

The figures include enrollment in public four-year and two-year institutions and represent an increase of 6.7 percent, or 5,909 students, over the previous year and an increase of 13.1 percent, or 10,867 students, over a five-year period.

It is interesting to note that the largest growth over the 5 year period was a school of Osteopathic Medicine. The West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine grew 114% (in terms of enrollment over the past 5 years).

(A Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine, or DO, is the degree you receive from a school of osteopathic medicine is similar to receiving anMD from a medical school — you have to go on and do a residency.)

Whats Wrong w/ Higher Ed in the US? Lots!

Newmark’s Door has a great blog entry offering a compilation of criticisms of higher education in the U.S. Those quoted included professors, entrepreneurs, and . Those targetted include law schools, humanities, and computer science departments. There is something for everyone in this piece. Here are a few snippets and who they are attributed to.

Joel Spolsky (Entrepreneur):

Many universities have managed to convince themselves that the more irrelevant the curriculum is to the real world, the more elite they are. It’s the liberal arts way. Leave it to the technical vocational institutes, the red-brick universities, and the lesser schools endowed with many compass points (“University of Northern Southwest Florida”) to actually produce programmers. The Ivy Leagues of the world want to teach linear algebra and theories of computation and Haskell programming, and all the striver CS departments trying to raise their standards are doing so by eliminating anything practical from the curriculum in favor of more theory.

Can You Be Entrepreneurial w/ a $1 Million Base Pay?

In recent years we have heard about how entrepreneurial university administrators have become. Creating new models and charting new paths for their august institutions. A new study from the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that 23 Private University Presidents in the US are making at least $1 million a year. Hot Dog, bureaucracy pays! From an article by Mary Beth Marklein in the USA Today,

Here are the Chronicle‘s findings, based on federal tax forms, of the highest-paid presidents of private non-profit colleges and universities. Compensation includes salaries, fees, bonuses, severance payments, deferred compensation, and health benefits and pension plans.

1. Shirley Ann Jackson, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y., $1,598,247.

2. Davd Sargent, Suffolk University, Boston, $1,496,593 .

3. Steadman Upham, University of Tulsa, $1,485,275.

4.Richard Meyers, Webster University, St. Louis, $1,429,738.

5. Cornelius Kerwin, American University, Washington, D.C., $1,419,339.

Perhaps the real entrepreneurial opportunity is becoming a money manager for Private University Presidents?

New Study on Education and Entrepreneurship

Thanks to Schumpeters Century for alerting us to a newish paper, Education and Entrepreneurship Selection and Performance: A Review of the Literature. (You need a sub — usually through a university — though if you email the authors they may send it to you?).

The authors, Justin van der Sluis and Mirjaam van Praag, looked at over 100 studies and came to some very interesting conclusions. Here is a snippet from the beginning of the paper;

The first set reflects the combined findings of the studies
in our sample. First, the effect of education on entry is neither positive nor negative.
Second, entrepreneurship performance, regardless of the performance measure used,
is significantly and positively associated with formal schooling. Third, the returns
to education, as measured by means of conditional correlations, are estimated at
6.1%.3 Fourth, a compilation of studies estimating the return to education for both
entrepreneurs and employees in a comparable fashion shows that the entrepreneurs
in the USA have a slightly higher return to their education than employees, whereas
the reverse is true in Europe. Fifth, the returns to schooling in entrepreneurship are
higher in the USA than in Europe. (p.2)

Looks pretty interesting. I am excited to read it.

Frontiers of Midwest/West Created Modern Am Univ.

As we continue researching and trying to understand the rise of entrepreneurs in and around campuses, we came across this in Rudolph’s The American College and University: A History (1990);

In the post-Civil War period, however, it became apparent that the American state university would be defined neither in the South, the first home of the state university movement, nor in the Northeast, where the old colonial institution precluded it growth. The American state university would be defined in the great Midwest and West, where frontier democracy and frontier materialism would help to support a practical-oriented popular institution.

(Rudolph, p. 277)

The point here is that until the Midwestern/Western state university institutionalized practical subjects and activities, the American college and university was pushing classic subjects that an American populace with a frontier mindset (practicality, innovation, etc.) had little interest in.

Harvard, Yale, and the like followed the path that leaders at schools such as University of Michigan and Wisconsin blazed with their frontier populations, turning the schools into institutions reflecting the needs and population of America. (I am sure Zuckerberg and Gates are thankful for that.)