Since none of these schools explained further what that meant, possibly because space was so limited, we were left with a mystery. Our choice was to accept such claims at face value. There were only a couple. More numerous were schools that characterized their programs as being about entrepreneurship, when it appeared to us, that their programs were really about the management of ongoing firms. Exhibit 1 is our view of whether a school focused on programs about independent business entry, or not.
Readers can, obviously, read the descriptions and form their own conclusions.
For all schools, we chose to accept one small business course as part of the entrepreneurship package and look for the other two courses among such subjects as entrepreneurship, start-up, venture creation, venture capital, etc. Subtracting the two community college programs and the thirty programs that seemed to be really centered upon ongoing business rather than independent venturing left us with a total of 104 out of the 126 responding four-year schools that seemed to have programs truly focused on entrepreneurship. There was still a wide range of programs, however, from schools like Iowa, Wichita State and DePaul which clearly had many entrepreneurship courses to those which squeaked by the threshold of three courses by counting small business management as one of them. Some schools did not actually list courses and, instead, only noted topics. We were not sure what to make of that, since all of these topics could probably be touched on in one lecture, with no depth.