22 September 2008

College Students Learning to Be Entrepreneurs

Cultural transformation under way on U.S. campuses

Nick Winter (left), George Saines and Scott Erickson created a computer program to teach Chinese writing.

By Guy Olson
Staff Writer

Washington — One of the surprising trends in U.S. higher education in recent years has been the growth of courses in entrepreneurship.

More than 5,000 entrepreneurship courses now are offered on college campuses, in contrast to 250 such courses in 1985, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, Missouri. And “the vast majority of next-generation entrepreneurs” are emerging not from business schools but “from engineering, biology, computer science, history, nursing, the arts — from all across campus,” said foundation Vice President Judith Cone.

Oberlin College in Ohio, a small, respected liberal arts college with some 2,800 students, is in the second year of its Creativity and Leadership project, an entrepreneurship training and development program created with the help of grant money from the Kauffman Foundation and the Burton D. Morgan Foundation of Hudson, Ohio, according to Andrea Kalyn, a dean at Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music. The program involves participation by experts from the business world.

“We took most of the grant money and poured it into funding opportunities for students with the idea we would create opportunities for them to develop their own entrepreneurship projects,” Kalyn said.

Nick Winter, with classmates George Saines and Scott Erickson, received a $30,000 grant from Oberlin this year to create a computer program to teach the writing of Chinese. It gives immediate feedback on the accuracy of the Chinese characters that users write on their computer screens with a mouse or a digital stylus.

“Basically, the original idea [for the program] happened at 3 a.m. in Beijing when I saw my friend perform ‘combat ninja’ surgery on his Nintendo DS” handheld game, said Winter, who had gone to China for a semester of language study. Winter remained inspired by witnessing such intricate maneuvers in a computer-video game, and when he returned to Oberlin, he recruited campus housemates Saines and Erickson to join him in designing a program that would use the same methods to teach the writing of intricate Chinese characters.

“When I landed in Oberlin, I dreamt nothing of entrepreneurship, programming or Chinese,” Winter said. “Oberlin gave those passions to me, and the entrepreneurship program … was that lucky spark.”

It was also a spark for Alia Kate who, after a year studying culture and language in Morocco, applied for a grant to establish a fair-trade import business called Kantara. Kate had visited women’s cooperatives created by the Peace Corps in Morocco and wanted to generate a U.S. market for their hand-woven textiles. She donates a percentage of her sales to charities that serve women and rural communities in Morocco.

It would appear that Kate has a soul mate in Ali Carroll at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, another Kauffman-grant school.

Ali Carroll started a company called Adia, which makes and sells jewelry from beads made by Kenyan women.

On a trip to Africa in 2006, Carroll purchased “some stunning handcrafted beads made by Kenyan women” and back home “began creating earrings, necklaces and other jewelry pieces” that became the foundation of Adia, her jewelry business.

So far, she has been selling her creations through a jewelry boutique in her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, as well as at jewelry shows in several other major cities and on campus. Carroll uses some of her profits to support a foundation that promotes health care, education and economic development in Kenya.

Earlier in 2008, Carroll received a post-graduate fellowship for a fifth year of study to develop Adia further. She is taking courses in jewelry design and fabrication, plus business classes — venture startup, buyer behavior, business promotion. At the same time she is working with rural women in Kenya to make beads for Adia and, eventually, to produce jewelry items. She recently purchased a piece of property there to serve as a work site.

Wake Forest spokesman Eric F. Frazier said Wake Forest’s entrepreneurship program “is tied to the university motto, pro humanitate” (“for the good of humankind”). He said more than 200 of Wake Forest’s 4,300 undergraduate students enrolled in one or more entrepreneurship courses during the past academic year and that dozens of successful student ventures had been launched. 

A popular on-campus service, he said, is Wake Wash, which picks up students’ dirty clothes every two weeks and returns them, clean and folded, for $200 a semester. Three juniors — Julie Musgrave, Eleanor Smith and Scott Graber — conceived the business when challenged in class to develop a company with a $40 startup investment. The three handle pickup and delivery, while the washing is done by a commercial cleaner.

One of the most venerable on-campus enterprises is the Georgetown University Alumni and Student Federal Credit Union in Washington, which celebrated its 25th anniversary this year. It is the largest student-run financial institution in the United States, with assets in excess of $10 million and more than 11,000 student and alumni account holders. More than 130 student interns work for the institution.

“We offer financial services that rival the largest corporate banks,” the credit union says on its Web site:  free checking and savings accounts, Visa debit cards, online banking privileges and loans, including home mortgages.

Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe, Arizona — one of the largest public universities in the country with more than 65,000 students — offers entrepreneurship courses in 116 different majors.

ASU supports student-run enterprises by providing startup funding, office space and training, according to Margaret Burch, a director of the entrepreneurship initiative. One student enterprise is eMusic Instruction, which offers live, private music lessons over the Internet. Students need a webcam and special videoconferencing software to interact with their teachers.

Another business started by ASU students is not operating at the moment, despite its timely environmental approach to transportation.  Green Taxi Cab has turned off its engines while it looks for investors.  That might be the most educational experience of all.

To learn more about the student-run businesses, visit their Web sites:  Skritter, Kantara, Adia, Wake Wash, Georgetown University Alumni and Student Federal Credit Union, eMusic Instruction and Green Taxi Cab.