Community Colleges and Entrepreneurship Education: Expanding the Circle

With community colleges making up the largest component of our higher education system, wouldn’t this be a good place to start training a new generation of entrepreneurs?

By Erik Pages – National Commission on Entrepreneurship in Entrepreneur.com

The 1990s witnessed something of a boom in entrepreneurship education, and America’s business schools were at the center of this shift. MBA programs were swamped with budding moguls who wanted to get their degrees and cash in on the start-up boom. We know now that these illusions were quickly dashed, and many would-be millionaires are now waiting tables or brewing lattes.

For many people, this experience implies some limits to entrepreneurship education. For us, it means that maybe we weren’t offering this education to the right people. Should MBAs be the primary, or only, target for advanced entrepreneurship education? Existing research demonstrates that the demographic group most likely to start a new business is not the MBA graduate student. Rather, it is the working adult between 25 and 44 years old. Are there education institutions suited to provide entrepreneurship education to this neglected market? In our view, community colleges rank at the top of this list. This NCOE Update assesses the potential for expanding entrepreneurship education at America’s community colleges.

When you ask many people about American higher education, they tend to think of traditional four-year colleges and universities. Yet community colleges are the largest component of our higher education system, with more than 1,100 schools located across the United States. Community colleges offer two-year degree programs as well a variety of training classes and initiatives. For those with an interest in expanding entrepreneurship, community colleges bring a lot to the table:

* They serve a huge number of students. Annual enrollment at America’s community colleges exceeds 10.4 million–5.4 million for-credit students, and 5 million noncredit.

* They exist in nearly every community. Not all regions boast a Stanford or MIT, but nearly every sizable community hosts a community college.

* They serve differing populations. Fifty-eight percent of community college students are women. Nonwhite students make up more than 30 percent of enrollments.

* They are market-driven. Community colleges have a long history of flexibly responding to the needs of local employers and residents.

* Finally, with respect to working adults who might be interested in entrepreneurship education, two final statistics are critical: 63 percent of community college students go part-time, and the average age of community college students is 29 years old.

Thanks to these characteristics, community colleges represent an important untapped resource in the field of entrepreneurship. They serve a large population and a working-adult population–including new immigrants–with very high motivation and interest in starting new businesses. Yet very few community colleges have instituted extensive entrepreneurship training programs.

Community colleges clearly have the capability to undertake initiatives of this sort. And interest in such programs is growing. The Trans-Atlantic Technology and Training Alliance (TA3), an international consortium of community colleges, is creating a number of learning exchanges where American and European community colleges are sharing best practices in entrepreneurship education. This initiative is also seeking to create a model entrepreneurship curriculum, based on the work of REAL Enterprises,http://www.realenterprises.org/ a North Carolina-based entrepreneurship education effort.

While this effort needs to be expanded across the nation, individual schools are moving forward with interesting initiatives of their own. North Carolina’s Haywood Community College http://www.haywood.cc.nc.us/hccflsh.html has established a school-wide Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative. This effort started in 1990 as a response to a number of plant closings in the rural regions of Western North Carolina. School officials there determined that the best way to recover was by helping local students learn to start new ventures of their own. The program has had a great deal of success–a 1999 study of businesses started by students between 1992 and 1998 found that 91 percent were still in business. These firms have had a major impact on expanding Haywood County’s economic base.

Innovations are also occurring in the inner city. Brooklyn’s Kingsborough Community College http://www.kbcc.cuny.edu/ has enjoyed great success with a new virtual enterprise project that teaches students entrepreneurship and management skills.

The challenge facing community college leaders is that initiatives such as these are still exceptional. Most community colleges still do not offer entrepreneurship training. Thus, there is a need to both expand such training and to formalize it through model curricula, teacher training, and the like. The good news is, there is strong student demand for such training. A 1999 study of Virginia community college students found that 84 percent were interested in entrepreneurship training.

Thus, the case for expanding community college-level entrepreneurship training is quite powerful. Market demand is strong in terms of student interest. Community colleges have shown in the past that they can respond to such market demand. The real question is not if they will move forward in this area, but when and how they do it.

To learn more about the TA3 initiative, visit http://www.rtsinc.org.

Erik Pages is policy director with the National Commission on Entrepreneurship, a Washington, DC, nonpartisan organization funded by the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership that focuses on public policy on entrepreneurship.

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