Entrepreneurs Are the Cool Kids on Campus

Reid iterates that groups such as Kairos and the hundreds of other that have emerged are what really have been fueling this entrepreneurial movement—providing young people with support systems and collaborative outlets for ideas.

“Entrepreneurship doesn’t need an infrastructure, but it does need a cultural backbone,” says Reid. “What these groups do better than anything else is create that culture.”

Data shows that entrepreneurship is a self-perpetuating phenomenon. The Kauffman Foundation found that youth who personally know another entrepreneur have the strongest interest in starting their own business. Among youth who know an entrepreneur, 46 percent would like to start or have already started businesses compared to 31 percent of young people who don’t know a business owner. 

“These things build on themselves. Today you have more success stories to model—from those iconic models in the news to colleagues and fellow students who have found success in entrepreneurship,” says Doug Rand, senior policy advisor of the White House Office of Science and Technology, in the Executive Office of the President. 

The community around entrepreneurs has proven to be crucial—in Carl Schramm’s “The Entrepreneurial Imperative” he cites that “studies show that the rate of success of a new business start-up can be improved by a factor of at least three if the entrepreneur has a mentor.”

With the jump in the number of entrepreneurial programs and organizations at the university level, schools have become breeding grounds for entrepreneurial pursuits says Susan Amat, executive director of The Launch Pad at Toppel, at the University of Miami.

“I think so many universities now embrace cross-campus, interdisciplinary collaboration and entrepreneurship is a natural outlet for the kinds of conversations that exist when you have people from different areas of study sharing ideas, problems and solutions,” says Amat. 

The YEC study found that amongst those ages 16 to 39 years, 88 percent believe that entrepreneurship education is important, especially given the new economy. Still, it is not all universities that have such programs, and not all are as helpful as others—within this same group only 26 percent were offered classes on entrepreneurship, and 72 percent who did take entrepreneurship courses found the education provided insufficient to start a business. 

Regardless, however, awareness of entrepreneurship through the media and success stories has helped to change the way it is viewed, says Sowa. 

“Nowadays, it is so much easier for people to accept the status of being an entrepreneur,” says Sowa. 

Amat and Reid further her point, stressing that particularly the credibility of young entrepreneurs has been improved in recent years—they are now viewed as much more legitimate and see greater respect from the business community. 

“One of the biggest trends is how there is this shift away from ‘student companies’ to ‘companies run by students’,” says Reid. “There used to be a limitation on the scope of what students were doing and that was a limitation on entrepreneurship. The ventures out there today are real, competitive viable companies—and that’s new. This makes entrepreneurship a more compelling alternative.”

But this entrepreneurial spirit seems to have impacted levels of society beyond just college students—even amongst those ages 8 to 17 years, 39 percent have an interest in starting a business someday, according to the Kauffman study. Nearly eight in ten students in grades 5 to 12 say they want to be their own boss, and 42 percent say they will invent something that changes the world, according to a Gallup poll. 

To Cem Erdem, founder of Project Skyway and an entrepreneur himself, entrepreneurship in America extends beyond a certain age group or sect. 

“I think it is the American dream to make it big. Nobody dreams about having a standard salary for a lifetime. Its in our DNA—we are an entrepreneurial nation,” says Erdem. “America breeds free thinking and free spirits, and that’s the foundation of being an entrepreneur.”