Top 3 Best Undergrad Programs for Entrepreneurs in 2022
Top 5 Best Undergrad Programs for Entrepreneurs in 2022
There are those who describe the current, faster-and-faster-moving marketplace as a fourth industrial revolution, and the best entrepreneurship programs are those that help students appropriately speed up and, when necessary, scale up their ideas, from unicorns to innovative business models.
Students who enroll at these schools will find themselves at the forefront of innovation and development, and often with an interdisciplinary focus that acknowledges the interconnectedness of today’s economy. Perhaps more importantly, they will also get opportunities to enrich themselves and their communities, adding economic and social value through innovation, team building, and leadership.
Entrepreneurship encompasses so much that it’s almost more than an academic discipline. Studying entrepreneurship involves building self-confidence and business connections alike, developing creativity, and getting real-world results. That’s why we’ve worked with The Princeton Review for fifteen years to point students in the right direction of the top-ranked undergraduate and graduate programs for entrepreneurs. This year’s survey considered more than 250 colleges and universities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Europe, and evaluated a multitude of factors. We considered not just the school’s programming but also its graduates’ success rates in the business world, the number of mentors available for students, and more.
1. University of Houston (#1 West)
University of Houston
Cyvia and Melvyn Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship
Houston, TX
Number of Entrepreneurship Courses Offered: 40
Tuition: $11,569 (in-state); $26,839 (out-of-state)
Companies Started by Graduates Over the Last 5 Years: 698
What Sets Us Apart
Our program at the University of Houston has been built around the needs of students and the desire to help them develop personally and professionally. Our student body is 45% Hispanic or Black, more than 50% first generation in college. They typically have not had leadership opportunities and often lack confidence and connections. If we only taught them how to market products or manage cash, we would not be positioning them to succeed. Consequently, we focus on providing tools and resources, so students become well-rounded leaders who can build strong relationships. We encourage and facilitate human development through numerous enrichment and outreach initiatives including mentoring, retreats, and others. Resources and partners needed to implement our program include:
• committed mentors (we have over 500 who participate with us)
• a staff member to train mentors and manage mentorship programs
• program managers to run extracurriculars
• professional partners such as banks and law firms
• scholarships to enable students to devote themselves to program activities: roughly 80% of our students have jobs to pay their way through school (we demand full commitment to our program, and scholarships allow students to work fewer hours)
• faculty who work together in a coordinated fashion
2. Babson College (#1 Northeast)
Babson College
Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship
Babson Park, MA
Number of Entrepreneurship Courses Offered: 39
Tuition: $55,714
Companies Started by Graduates Over the Last 5 Years: 256
What Sets Us Apart
Babson College educates entrepreneurial leaders who create great economic and social value everywhere. Entrepreneurship is more than an academic discipline at Babson; it is a way of life. We teach entrepreneurship as a method so that students practice Entrepreneurial Thought and Action® (ET & A) in a variety of curricular and co-curricular settings, both on campus and around the world.
Entrepreneurship is a required course for every single Babson student, and 70% of students take one of more than 70 electives. Babson College has the largest number of dedicated entrepreneurial faculty in the world. The entrepreneurship department has 51 faculty members: 23 full-time academics and 28 adjuncts, 100% of whom have both entrepreneurial and teaching experience. We have trained over 5,000 faculty from all over the world in our unique pedagogy of teaching entrepreneurship, in our Price Babson Entrepreneurship Educators Program.
3. Brigham Young University (#2 West)
Brigham Young University
Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology
Provo, UT
Number of Entrepreneurship Courses Offered: 58
Tuition: $5,790 (LDS); $11,580 (Non-LDS)
Companies Started by Graduates Over the Last 5 Years: 419
What Sets Us Apart
After careful review, we believe Brigham Young University has the finest integrated core for teaching entrepreneurship in the world. The curriculum reflects the latest academic thinking and research in the field and is augmented with real-world experiential learning components and frameworks.
Our curriculum is deeply rooted in lean startup and design thinking principles and practices. In fact, we were one of the first universities to comprehensively adopt this approach in our entrepreneurship education. To this day, many schools around the world continue to teach their students to write static and outdated business plans instead of identifying, testing, and pivoting on key business model hypotheses.
Lean methodologies help entrepreneurs operate more effectively and efficiently within the areas of uncertainty that they face every day as they search for a repeatable and scalable business model and aim to achieve product/market fit. This approach is allowing us to educate smarter entrepreneurs who launch validated ventures that last. Cutting-edge academic offerings combined with deep mentoring is our secret sauce.
