Entrepreneurship and the start-up industry are two topics that have increased in popularity over the last decades with the media discussing it more and non-profits, governments and academic institutions developing initiatives around it. However, students aren’t flocking to the major or registering for entrepreneurship courses at the rates that you would assume. Less than two percent of business school professors teach the subject and less than one percent of freshmen have intentions to major in it. According to the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA, which surveys incoming college freshmen annually, only 0.7 percent of the 193,000 students at 283 U.S. colleges and universities who responded to the 2012 survey, said that they intended to choose entrepreneurship as their course of study. In comparison: 2.3 percent of incoming college students plan to study accounting; 2.6 percent intend to major in elementary education; 6.9 percent aim to major in biology; 2.7 percent plan to study mechanical engineering; and 1.0 percent intend to major in economics. A trend that was noticed was that entrepreneurship was of interest to more students at historically Black colleges and universities.
The percentages were also noticeably lower at other types of academic institutions. The HERI survey found that 0.8 percent of freshmen at nonsectarian colleges, and 0.6 at Catholic institutions planned to major in the subject. But only 0.5 percent of students at non-Catholic religious institutions planned to study the topic. It also revealed that 1.2 percent of students at private universities, but only 0.7 percent of students at public universities, planned to major in the subject.As past research has indicated, the vast majority of intended entrepreneurship majors were male. The HERI survey shows that 1.1 percent of male students plan to major in entrepreneurship versus only 0.3 percent of college women.
At most schools and colleges, enterprise classes and majors are taught by business school employees, yet just a minority of licensed business schools overall offer degrees in the subject. As stated by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) – the biggest cooperation of business employees and managers – 21 percent of AACSB-licensed organizations overall offer no less than one undergrad program in enterprise or little business and 10 percent give no less than one system at the MBA level. Just 6 percent of schools offer a claim to fame graduate degree in the subject.
Just a minor cut of full-time business school working parts falls in the enterprise discipline – 2 percent of the aggregate full-time staff pool at AACSB-licensed establishments. That number is developing gradually, with the AACSB reporting its licensed foundations wanted to build the amount of “full-time doctoral positions” in the order by 4 percent in the latest year its part establishments were reviewed.
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