Kelsey Gee reported yesterday at The Wall Street Journal Online that, “Millennial entrepreneurs are starting to hear an unlikely piece of advice when their ventures stall: consider an M.B.A.
“Graduate business programs from Columbia University in New York to University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School have spent millions of dollars building innovation centers and creating venture-capital funds in recent years. They are adding new courses and deploying industry veterans to teach, all in an effort to recruit more would-be founders.
“A quarter of prospective M.B.A. students aimed to start a business in 2015, according to the latest Graduate Management Admission Council survey, up from 20% in 2010. Even so, academia has been slow to adapt, with fewer than 10% of graduate business programs offering degrees in entrepreneurship last year, according to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.”
The Journal article noted that, “The ballooning resources for student ventures reflect a streak of opportunism among young entrepreneurs in need of funding and university admissions officers, who can proudly plug graduates’ startups on their schools’ websites. Some administrators hope the growing interest among millennials to create companies—rather than pursue traditional post-M.B.A. careers like investment banking—will reinflate a shrinking pool of applicants to U.S. business schools.”
Ms. Gee added that, “Business degrees have become an easier sell for would-be founders as schools now teach how to grow small businesses, in addition to managing large ones, said Steve Blank, an entrepreneur and lecturer at Haas and Columbia’s business school.”
