Student Uprising

That transformation has not been lost on students. Not only is everything up for grabs, not only does opportunity abound, but the traditional routes into the marketplace also have changed dramatically. "The days when students would find 10 corporate recruiters fighting over them are long gone," says UT graduate business student Mike Hanratty, 33, an IC2 alum who, along with partner and fellow student Irene Bond, 40, recently launched True Dimensions to commercialize a "relaxation chair" based on Skylab research and the work of an industrial designer under contract to NASA. "So I think many students have become more entrepreneurial."

The drop in campus recruiting is nationwide. Officials at the University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business say they have an increasingly tough time luring corporate recruiters to campus, particularly from major but distant East Coast corporations. "Many large companies don't have budgets for those visits anymore," notes the Haas School's public-affairs director, David Irons. As a result, Irons says, more and more students are finding ways to create their own opportunities. At the Haas School fully one-third of the graduate students now seek entrepreneurial internships each year.

Staggering tuition costs also play a role in the burgeoning of campus businesses. College tuition costs increased an average of about 40% between 1990 and 1995. And for students in need of income, high-tech start-ups are not the only option. Columbia University American-urban-and-ethnic-history graduate student Seth Kamil, 29, and fellow student Ed O'Donnell, 31, for instance, made a business out of walking tours of New York City in 1991. The idea came from one of Kamil's professors, urban historian Jim Shenton, who occasionally led city tours but left it to his student to turn the concept into a business. "The costs of going to school had everything to do with creating this company," Kamil says. "I had no choice." Big Onion Walking Tours employs about 10 other grad students and conducted more than 700 walking tours of New York City last year, up 25% from the previous year.

The tours, which draw as many as 500 participants a day, are what Kamil calls his "ticket to independence." On a recent tour, Kamil points out Potter's Field on the laminated map he put together for one of his classes. "This is where many slaves from Africa are buried," he lectures, drawing examples and anecdotes from his thesis notes. Just two semesters away from finishing his graduate degree, Kamil, the son of a college professor, is now pondering whether he should pursue his original goal of following in his father's footsteps or stick with his now-burgeoning business as dean of his own brigade of street professors. (His former partner, O'Donnell, opted to accept a teaching job at New York's Hunter College.) "We had no idea this would take off as it has," Kamil says over cappuccino at his favorite coffee shop, near Little Italy. "I don't know if I can walk away from this now. We're growing so fast, and I'm just not sure I can find another opportunity as exciting as this one."

U.S. colleges and universities are "an ideal setting for new business ideas," says Larry Mohr, a venture capitalist with Mohr Davidow Ventures, who teaches a class on entrepreneurship at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "There is something about a college campus," Mohr offers. "People there seem more free to experiment with new ideas, with new approaches, with new ways of doing things."

Another advantage for campus start-ups is the number of students trained to help out. The formal study of entrepreneurship has blossomed recently, growing from just a handful of academic programs 15 years ago to more than 500 formal academic entrepreneurial programs today. Many campus entrepreneurs are fueling their enterprises with the help of other students, who increasingly must complete real-world business studies or internships as part of their academic course work.

Marty Sikes, like the Big Onion's Kamil, needed money for tuition. Working 60 hours a week at a local one-hour-photo shop to put himself through the University of Central Arkansas, Sikes, the son of an artist mother and a shoe- designer father, echoes a familiar college-student refrain: no matter how hard he worked, he still could not make enough money to cover his monthly bills. So he quit his job. "I figured I could be broke on my own," he drawls.

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