Over the past 20 years there has been a seismic shift in higher education toward entrepreneurship and innovation fueled by student interest, alumni support and market forces. Through the establishment of incubators and centers for entrepreneurship, colleges have made sizable financial commitments to maximize the research, ideas and talent associated with their institution and community.
Initiatives designed to support students’ interest in solving global problems through entrepreneurship abound: startup internships, mentoring, seed funding, professional workshops and the like are becoming increasingly common in the liberal arts context. Twenty of the Top 50 liberal arts schools have some variant of a dedicated director-level position to support innovation and entrepreneurship on campus. While students are undoubtedly motivated to participate by the prospect of starting the next Warby Parker, colleges have embraced the pedagogical value of entrepreneurship as a skillset applicable across professional domains.
Students’ participation builds valuable human/social capital, extended professional networks and send a powerful market signal to employers that they have the skills and interests increasingly demanded in our hyper competitive world. As such, these centers are becoming important arbiters of campus opportunities that support mobility, self-agency and proxies for hard to measure qualities, such curiosity and ambition.
Which begs the important questions: who is taking advantage of them and why?
At Lafayette we measure both expressed interest, like signing up for center communications, and active engagement, like showing up for events. In the former, all racial groups are proportionately represented, (with the exception of international students who are slightly overrepresented) suggesting all students recognize the value of this programming. But in that latter group we see significant underrepresentation by Black and Hispanic American students, which is consistent with empirical evidence of a racial gap in extracurricular participation.
In follow-up interviews to understand the disconnect, we hear a consistent theme of time constraints due to classes, work or other obligations.
Like many other selective liberal arts colleges, we’ve worked to increase our socioeconomic diversity and admit larger numbers of first-generation students. Hardworking, talented and resilient, these students are often less prepared for the academic rigor than their affluent peers and have less financial and social capital at their disposal to navigate an elite liberal arts terrain. Because these students work harder to catch up academically and work longer hours for spending money, entrepreneurship centers become the college version of traveling soccer leagues — pay to play programs inhabited by children from upper middle-class backgrounds.
