Correction:
An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of student Yaella Landau. This version has been corrected.
Matt McClain/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST - Melissa Eddison, 22, in the GroW Community Garden on the campus of George Washington University. Eddison is working to create a sustainable urban cafe called Funkstown Food Co-Op.
John LaPides leans back in his chair and watches as the next young entrepreneur takes a seat across from him at a long wooden table.
LaPides’s student assistant sets a timer for 10 minutes, and Pitch Dingman, a weekly speed-pitching session at the University of Maryland’s Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship, begins.
(Matt McClain/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST) - James Li, 20, a student at Georgetown University started REaction Strategy Group, a consulting group for nonprofits.
“This is really in the ‘written on the back of a napkin’ phase,” warns Yaella Landau, a 22-year-old pre-dental senior, before pitching an idea for artisanal homemade vanilla extract packaged in pretty bottles.
LaPides, one of the center’s “entrepreneurs in residence,” nods enthusiastically as Landau describes how the bottles would help distinguish the product. He tells her that companies such as Celestial Seasonings have succeeded in selling products with whimsical packaging, and peppers her with questions about the manufacturing process and competition until the stopwatch hits 60 seconds.
“One minute,” the student assistant says quietly. “We should talk about next steps.”
LaPides wraps up quickly — there’s a line of other student entrepreneurs waiting outside to pitch their own business ideas.
Roughly two dozen students file in over two hours, including a young Chinese woman, who wants to sell mass-produced versions of her native Sichuan “hot pots,” and Chris DeVore, a junior who wants to design hats and gloves made of a synthetic material that mimics the properties of reindeer fur.
Similar scenes are playing out on college campuses across the country, where an explosion of new pitch sessions, business plan competitions and entrepreneurship courses are catering to a new kind of student entrepreneur.
Driven by a desire to find personal fulfillment along with a paycheck, and by a sour economy that makes traditional employment seem just as risky as starting a business, members of the so-called millennial generation — the 20-something children of the baby boomers — are increasingly forgoing traditional career paths and are hatching business plans based on social responsibility and their own passions, interests and ideals.
“The down economy has made students realize that there may not be a cushy job at the end of this rainbow,” says Asher Epstein, managing director of the Dingman Center. “So they’re taking their destiny into their own hands.”
* * *
The idea that entrepreneurship is something that can take place, and be taught, on a college campus isn’t new.
Most entrepreneurship educators believe the first formal entrepreneurship class was taught to Harvard MBA students in 1947. Entrepreneurial education gained momentum in the 1960s, and by 1985, more than 250 entrepreneurship courses were offered at colleges throughout the country, according to the Kauffman Foundation, a research group focused on entrepreneurship.
Since then, “the number of entrepreneurship programs has quadrupled and quintupled,” says Eric K. Martin, co-director of the Galant Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce.
Martin says participation in U-Va.’s entrepreneurship program has doubled in the past four years, with 10 percent of eligible students now taking part.
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