Entrepreneurship Education for the Rest of Us

Entrepreneurship majors, like ours here at Belmont, attract only a small percentage of students interested in business ownership. In fact, an annual survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education finds that about 40% of today’s students cite owning their own business as one of the major motivations for going to college. And yet, even the most successful entrepreneurship major will attract at most 1% of the student body. This is somewhat of a concern given the importance of education in improving the success rates of entrepreneurs starting new ventures. So how do we help the rest of them?
Many schools are beginning to implement programs to reach the rest of these students where they learn. In Art, Music, Theater, English, Political Science, Biology, or whatever program they are pursuing. This is being done by offering them minors in entrepreneurship and by creating a wide array of co-curricular programs that get integrated into their education experiences.
One of the major pushes for this type of initiative is being made by the Coleman Foundation. Belmont University’s Center for Entrepreneurship has just been awarded a $150,000 grant from the Coleman Foundation to expand our program called “Entrepreneurship Across Belmont.”