I’ve been teaching entrepreneurship for more than 25 years. My degrees in English and law and my lifelong love of politics have provided a different perspective and a distinct pedagogy. I want students to understand the contributions entrepreneurship has made to American prosperity and the political structures that have made entrepreneurship possible.
Unfortunately, that’s not what’s typically taught. The standard way of approaching the subject matter is teaching students about innovation and how to start and run businesses.
That isn’t enough.
For years, I’ve tried to make educators and administrators understand that we have been ignoring the single biggest threat to entrepreneurship, and that is the support for socialism that is being taught on our campuses and is spreading among the population.
They don’t get it.
For example, when I was asked in 2005 to create a cross-campus minor in entrepreneurship at the University of Illinois, I argued for a required course in entrepreneurship and public policy. The business professors shrugged: We don’t need that. That’s just a law class. We need to teach management and marketing and economics and finance.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. This wasn’t “just a law class.” And the traditional business curriculum already teaches those subjects very well. But learning how to start a business — especially in fields where the technologies are brand-new and virtually every aspect of the business model (What’s the product? Who’s the customer? Where’s the competition?) is uncertain — is completely different from running an established company with customers in defined markets and in identified industries.
What I saw was that the skills needed to start a completely new business are precisely those we should be using when implementing public policy: identifying a problem, proposing possible solutions and testing hypotheses using as little money as possible. In other words, find out what you’re wrong about early, fix the issues and then expand the programs. (Or, as I’ve coined the phrase, “Start up, screw up, scale up.”)
What’s true in business is true in governance. But we don’t do that.
Instead, we throw billions of dollars at untested assumptions because “the problem is so serious” or because those proposing the solutions have good intentions. And then when the policies fail, no one admits the assumptions were wrong; instead, it’s “we just need more money.”
Private companies that fail so abominably go bankrupt. But when the money is coming from taxpayers, everyone believes there will always be more.
That’s dangerously false. Tax revenues aren’t unlimited, and unsolved problems get worse while politicians and heads of nongovernmental organizations get rich making promises they won’t keep. That makes the public — understandably — cynical.
You’d think successful entrepreneurs, at least, would understand this. Some — like Elon Musk — do. But it’s shocking to see the number of phenomenally successful entrepreneurs who defend government intervention in markets, promote socialism of one sort or another, or donate billions to NGOs whose activities exacerbate the very problems they say they want to solve.
That’s why I put the eye-opening documentary “Poverty, Inc.” into my entrepreneurship and management courses. Students need to understand that incorrect assumptions — which can doom their budding ventures — are even more destructive when implemented by nonprofits or as government policy.
It’s deeply gratifying to see the lights go on. But these students are in the class because they’re already interested in starting their own businesses someday. We need to be reaching students who aren’t studying entrepreneurship, business or engineering.
In 2011, I had a disagreement on this point with economist Carl Schramm, then-president of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, who was at the University of Notre Dame giving a lecture to one of my classes. The Kansas City, Missouri-based foundation was at the time the largest private organization in the U.S. funding entrepreneurship education.
“We should be teaching entrepreneurship to all students,” I told Carl, “not just those who are already interested in starting companies.”
He scoffed. “That’s a waste of time. Why?”
My response: “Because they vote.”
I made a similar argument at the Global Conference of Entrepreneurship Centers that year. A frequent topic of conversation at these conferences is how to measure the success of the programs. That inevitably translates to “How can we get more students to start businesses while they’re in college?”
That’s shortsighted. Educating college students about entrepreneurship has value beyond business creation. As I put it to my GCEC colleagues, “We teach civics and political science, and we don’t measure the success of those programs by how many students go out and start countries.”
In the 15 years since, my pleas have, for the most part, fallen on deaf ears. But events across the country (and the rest of the world) have proven me right. In state and in federal elections, candidates are now running on explicitly socialist — and even communist — platforms. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has called for “the warmth of collectivism.” His tenants’ rights czar, Cea Weaver, wants to abolish private property and says home ownership is a “tool of white supremacy.” Darializa Avila Chevalier, running for Congress in New York, wants government control of the means of production. Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed insists he is a capitalist, but his half-sister (an avowed communist) suggested he’s only saying that to get elected.
That college-educated people subscribe to these discredited ideologies is a stain upon our educational system. It’s not merely that collectivism was responsible for the deaths of more than 100 million people (most of starvation, attributable to communist and socialist policies that destroyed agricultural production), and the suffering of millions more, over the past century.
It’s that these people are beneficiaries of the very system they want to dismantle, and they don’t see it. They arrive at their “protests” well fed, clad in the latest fashions and carrying the most updated versions of smartphones and wearable tech. They depend upon the internet and social media. They take their constitutional rights for granted. They have never lived under a collectivist regime. More to the point, they have no idea what it takes to start or grow a business, to produce goods and services people need, to make a payroll. They’ve been told that financial success is a function of “greed,” and they believe it.
Those responsible for educating the younger generations should be connecting the dots between political liberty and economic prosperity; we can and should distinguish between crony capitalism, for example, and the entrepreneurial capitalism that has made the American dream possible for so many.
But far too many educators treat their programs like little silos. They aren’t interested in the larger picture. And plenty of Americans see once-prosperous nations that have collapsed under collectivism and think, “That can’t happen here.”
They’re all fiddling while Rome burns. As the events across Europe demonstrate, that is no longer a metaphor.
Maybe some of you see things differently. If so, I’d love to help. If you have an entrepreneurship program at your institution and you’re looking for greater impact, please get in touch with me.
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