Entrepreneurship Education Is Failing Its Biggest Test, Educator Warns

A professor who has taught entrepreneurship for more than 25 years says the standard curriculum — how to start and run a business — is missing the single biggest threat to enterprise: the spread of socialist ideas on American campuses. Laura Hollis, whose column appears via Creators Syndicate, lays the blame squarely on educators and administrators who, in her words, "don't get it."

The centerpiece of her argument dates to 2005, when the University of Illinois asked her to build a cross-campus minor in entrepreneurship. She pushed for a required course in entrepreneurship and public policy. Business professors shrugged it off: "We don't need that. That's just a law class. We need to teach management and marketing and economics and finance."

Hollis calls that reaction wrong three times over. The traditional business curriculum already teaches those subjects well, she writes. Starting a business — especially with brand-new technologies where every part of the model is uncertain — is a completely different skill set from running an established company with defined customers and known competitors.

What does startup thinking offer policymakers?

Hollis argues the skills founders use map directly onto how government should design policy: identify a problem, propose solutions, and test hypotheses with as little money as possible. Her shorthand for it: "Start up, screw up, scale up."

Government, by contrast, throws billions of dollars at untested assumptions because a problem seems serious or the proposers have good intentions. When the policies fail, nobody admits the assumptions were wrong. The answer becomes "we just need more money." Private companies that fail that badly go bankrupt; taxpayer-funded programs assume the money never runs out.

She cites the documentary "Poverty, Inc.," which she assigns in her entrepreneurship and management courses, to show students that wrong assumptions are even more destructive when implemented by nonprofits or as government policy. The lights go on, she says — but only for students already interested in founding companies.

Should every student learn entrepreneurship?

In 2011, Hollis debated economist Carl Schramm, then president of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation — at the time the largest private U.S. funder of entrepreneurship education — during his lecture at the University of Notre Dame. "We should be teaching entrepreneurship to all students," she told him, "not just those who are already interested in starting companies."

He scoffed: "That's a waste of time. Why?"

Her response: "Because they vote."

At the Global Conference of Entrepreneurship Centers that same year, she pushed back against measuring program success by counting student startups. "We teach civics and political science, and we don't measure the success of those programs by how many students go out and start countries."

Fifteen years on, what changed?

Hollis says her pleas have mostly fallen on deaf ears — and that events have proven her right. She points to candidates in state and federal elections running on explicitly socialist and even communist platforms, naming New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has called for "the warmth of collectivism"; his tenants' rights czar, Cea Weaver, who wants to abolish private property; congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, who wants government control of the means of production; and Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, whose avowedly communist half-sister suggested his capitalist positioning is for electability.

The deeper indictment lands on education itself. Collectivism, she writes, was responsible for more than 100 million deaths over the past century, most from starvation after policies destroyed agricultural production. Today's college-educated advocates, she argues, are beneficiaries of the system they want to dismantle — well fed, carrying the latest smartphones, taking constitutional rights for granted, and having never made a payroll.

Educators should connect the dots between political liberty and economic prosperity, she writes, and distinguish crony capitalism from the entrepreneurial capitalism behind the American dream. Instead, programs operate as silos. Her closing note to practitioners: if your institution's entrepreneurship program wants greater impact, she'd love to hear from you.