Over 10,000 New College Startups Each Year

**collegemogul** · 05-23-2008 02:28 PM

I recently won a business plan competition at Boston College for my blog and media company College Mogul.

Since we are all young entrepreneurs here, I would like to share part of our market analysis on why collegiate entrepreneurship is growing.

One thing is for sure: collegiate entrepreneurship is on the rise. The number of classes, programs and students who begin pursuing their own ventures while in school is increasing dramatically. Anne Swift, founder of the non-profit organization Young Inventors International (YII) suggests that universities offer a “thriving ecosystem that lends itself particularly well to entrepreneurship among students.” She notes that universities are packed with free or low cost resources as well as large bodies of talented individuals. It has been very easy for students to map the ecosystem used by successful collegiate startups; therefore, there is greater awareness of resources and
human capital. Moreover, students seem to realize that it is more worthwhile to build their own assets rather than someone else's. The increasing interest of entrepreneurship can be seen in data collected by the University at Berkeley proclaiming that "in the 1980s only 2 percent of graduating MBAs wanted to become entrepreneurs. Today, that number is up to 20 percent."

The 2007 Princeton Review of the top 50 best entrepreneurial colleges shows that last year there were 17,743 students enrolled in the top 25 undergraduate entrepreneurship programs with a cumulative total of 442 entrepreneurial courses offered and 75 clubs and organizations established. Of these students, more than 25% started a business while in school, putting the total number of startups at 4,487. Approximately 68% of these businesses are still operating. In addition, another 18% of these recent graduates started another 3,189 businesses. This means that there are nearly 7,500 new startups each year from the top 25 entrepreneurial schools alone. Although this data only represents 25 universities, the totals can probably be at least doubled to include all universities.

.....Google and Yahoo came out of Stanford and Microsoft and Facebook came from Harvard dropouts...who will be the next College Mogul. Check out the Blog