Entrepreneurship Can’t Be Taught in a College Classroom
“In order to succeed in business a man does not need a degree from a school of business administration. These schools train the subalterns for routine jobs. They certainly do not train entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur cannot be trained. A man becomes an entrepreneur by seizing an opportunity and filling the gap. No special education is required for such a display of keen judgment, foresight, and energy.”—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Fox Business reported in 2016 that more than 2,000 colleges and universities in the US offer a course in entrepreneurship. And why not? Fifty-four percent of Millennials want to start a business. Twenty years ago, fewer than 50 universities offered degrees in entrepreneurship. In 2023, there are 150 entrepreneurship programs, including most of the top business schools in the country. The top ten schools for entrepreneurship include prestigious universities like MIT, University of California, Berkeley, Penn, University of Utah, Babson College, University of Michigan, Baylor, and North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
While querying Google “What is an entrepreneur?” pictures of these individuals appeared: Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Oprah Winfrey. Branson has dyslexia, did poorly in school, never went to college, and reportedly started his first business at 16. Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College after one semester. Bill Gates left Harvard after two years. Elon Musk earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and physics from Penn, but dropped out of Stanford after two days. Jeff Bezos graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. Oprah Winfrey said in a commencement address, “So I got my degree from Tennessee State, right around the time I got my third Emmy.” That same year she was also in the beginning stages of launching her own production company Harpo Studios.
While all are (or were) great entrepreneurs, few earned college degrees and none were schooled in entrepreneurship. Media mogul Ted Turner studied the classics at Brown but was expelled before graduating. Kirk Kerkorian dropped out of the eighth grade. Sheldon Adelson attended City College of New York but did not graduate. For sure, none of these famous entrepreneurs took inane courses with titles such as: “Business Model Development,” “Corporate Entrepreneurship: Initiating and Sustaining Innovations,” “Business Problem Formulation and Solving,” or “Social Entrepreneurship in Action.”
Dina Dwyer-Owens—CEO of The Dwyer Group who informally teaches entrepreneurship courses at Baylor University—told Fox Business, “I actually spend a good 30 minutes in my presentation talking about the importance of getting clear about what your values are in operating your business and how you can attract the types of team members that are like minded,” she says. “You certainly want team members that have strengths and weaknesses that complement yours, but having the same values in mind is key in building a business.” “Values” and “team members” doesn’t sound like entrepreneurship but instead, political correctness.
In a utterly laughable statement, Ms. Dwyer-Owens claims students can learn how to identify and establish a strategic planning process for a future business through their coursework. The country should have successful entrepreneurs popping up like dandelions anytime now.
According to Ludwig von Mises,
What distinguishes the successful entrepreneur and promoter from other people is precisely the fact that he does not let himself be guided by what was and is, but arranges his affairs on the ground of his opinion about the future. He sees the past and the present as other people do; but he judges the future in a different way.
A college degree is certification that the student has learned what was and is. Success at university is not formulating opinions about the future but to learn and memorize the opinions of professors, who learned from their professors, who learned from their professors, and so on.
Frank Knight distinguished entrepreneurs from other businesspeople by their willingness to act in the face of uncertainty. Entrepreneurs often don’t know whether their product will work, how it will be manufactured, who the customers will be, or how they can be reached. For Knight, in the face of uncertainty entrepreneurs act while others dither. Spending four or more years working toward a college degree is dithering, if nothing else.
For Israel Kirzner the entrepreneur is a person who, “upon seeing a
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
