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Colleges get entrepreneurial bent – Focus of courses is to start a firm

Small business has become big business for Chicago-area colleges and universities.

By John Schmeltzer
Tribune staff reporter

Students at big-name schools as well as at community colleges are demanding more courses that teach the basics of starting a business. And what may be more important than the how-to help: The emerging courses are teaching students where to look for the money they will need to run a business.

"We have doubled the enrollment this year, and I think that is, in part, a reflection of the economy," said Michael Drafke, a professor of business marketing and management at the College of Du Page in Glen Ellyn.

"But there are always a certain core that think and dream of starting their own businesses," he said, noting that the college’s entrepreneurship program has been a staple for a number of years.

The College of DuPage program is part of a wave that began sweeping the country in the mid-1990s, when students saw entrepreneurship as the highway to individual wealth.

"Between 1995 and 2000, the get-rich-scheme students believed that this was the next California Gold Rush, and that brought a lot of interest to our programs," said James Schraeger, clinical professor of entrepreneurship and strategy at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

But a study prepared by Deborah Streeter, a senior professor of personal enterprise at Cornell University in New York, shows students "increasingly understand the value, if not the necessity, of becoming the sole proprietors of their own careers."

More than 1,500 schools now offer small-business courses, but fewer than half offer specialization programs.

In addition to the University of Chicago, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, DePaul University, Loyola University and the University of Illinois at Chicago offer entrepreneurship programs at either the undergraduate or graduate level.

DePaul recently received a grant of $2.5 million to help fund the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center at the university’s College of Commerce.

In the suburbs, virtually all of the community colleges offer courses or operate small-business development centers to help prepare students wanting to run their own businesses.

Malcolm X College, a part of the City Colleges of Chicago, has a business incubator center in its small-business offerings. Chicago State University, on the city’s Southeast Side, is in the process of revamping its curriculum to permit it to offer more entrepreneurship courses.

"We have begun to look at a curriculum that will develop a minor in entrepreneurship," said Lydia McKinley Floyd, dean of the university’s business school, which offers a variety of small-business courses.

"We felt we needed to beef up our programs so we could act as a catalyst within the community."

The economic changes wrought during the past three years "have really changed how people are looking at these kinds of programs,." Floyd said.

This month, the Kansas City, Mo.-based Kauffman Foundation said it wants to see these programs expanded to allow entrepreneurship education available campus-wide.

To accomplish that, the foundation, which specializes in promoting small- business issues, said it will award grants of up to $5 million to as many as seven U.S. universities based on proposals to expand their entrepreneurship programs beyond the business school.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Purdue University and the University of Wisconsin are among the 15 universities vying for the grants.

"We want all students, not just those enrolled in business or engineering schools, to have access to the skills, orientation and networks that lead to greater opportunities for them and result in more jobs, innovation and prosperity for America," said Carl Schramm, president and chief executive of the foundation.

"Entrepreneurship was a bit of a later bloomer that got a huge push in the late `’90s," said the U. of C.’s Schraeger. "It will continue to be a very vibrant and growing area."

Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/smallbusiness/chi-0307210157jul21,1,1494739.story?coll=chi-business-hed

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