Phil Knight Built Nike. Now He's Backing an Engineering College for Student Entrepreneurs

Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike, is putting his name and money behind an engineering college aimed at student entrepreneurs, as Inc. reports.

The move marks a new chapter for the 86-year-old billionaire, who built Nike from a handshake import operation into one of the most valuable sportswear brands in the world. Knight co-founded the company that became Nike in 1964 with his former track coach, Bill Bowerman. He served as CEO, later as chairman, and stepped down from the board in 2016.

His new project shifts that energy toward higher education. Rather than funding athletics facilities or business schools — areas where he has been a major donor before — Knight is now backing an engineering college built around student entrepreneurs, according to Inc.

The logic tracks with his own history. Nike began as a venture launched by a recent graduate with a business degree from Stanford and $1,200 in initial orders from a Japanese shoe manufacturer. Knight has long argued that entrepreneurs learn by building, not by studying building.

For the engineering students the college targets, the appeal is direct access to capital and mentorship from one of the most successful founder-operators in American business. Knight's involvement signals that the institution intends to treat student ventures as startups in their own right, not as classroom exercises.

Knight has already established himself as one of the largest individual donors in American higher education. His philanthropy has historically favored institutions he attended and programs tied to innovation and athletics.

The new engineering college extends that pattern into entrepreneurship education at a time when universities face mounting pressure to prove they can produce founders, not just graduates. Whether Knight's founder-first model can be institutionalized — replicated inside a curriculum the way it once operated inside a startup — will be the test the college sets for itself.