Entrepreneurship: We Spend Twelve Years Training It Out, Then Sell a Semester to Put It Back

While looking into entrepreneurship education, the most-cited piece of evidence that keeps coming up is one that educators might not like to hear in as much as it requires we think differently than what we’re doing now. George Land and Beth Jarman, administered a divergent-thinking assessment, originally built for NASA to identify creative engineers, to a cohort of 1,600 young children in 1968 and then re-tested the same children as they aged. The results, published in their book Breakpoint and Beyond, are why we’re here:

98% of children aged 4–5 scored at “genius level” in divergent thinking; by age 10 that fell to roughly 30%; by age 15 to about 12%; and among 280,000 adults tested, only 2% scored at that level.

Read that again please because I want you to be alarmed, concerned, and consider that we’re doing it wrong.

Divergent thinking is the ability to look at one problem and generate many possible answers rather than hunting for the single correct one; this is the cognitive raw material of entrepreneurship, and it collapses with years of schooling.

Land wrote, highlighted in a great piece by The Open School:

“What we have concluded is that non-creative behavior is learned.”

This is a study I’d like us to be intellectually honest about because you should never repeat a statistic you can’t defend, and if you cite Land, someone will eventually challenge you. I’m citing Land, and reviewing this work, because schools are increasingly asking me about entrepreneurship education and they struggle to understand what I mean when I reply from my experience, “you can’t teach entrepreneurship,” when seemingly every university and public school curriculum now has an entrepreneurship class taught by the Professor of Entrepreneurship.

An appeal to common practice doesn’t validate that it works. The existence of astrology departments wouldn’t prove astrology predicts the future.

And I say that because this research in particular requires some critical thinking and our own observation. The finding lives in a trade book rather than a peer-reviewed journal, and skeptics have gone looking for the original NASA dataset without finding it. So, let’s cite it for what it is; a widely-referenced observation, not a controlled published experiment. The directional claim, which I argue we can agree with, that the trait declines as schooling accumulates, does not rest on Land alone; Sir Ken Robinson built the most-watched TED talk in history on the same argument:

“We are educating people out of their creative capacities.”

This Was the Design, Not an Accident

The model of mass education we still run was built at the turn of the twentieth century for a specific purpose, and that purpose was not producing founders. It was producing employees; punctual, rule-following, standardized, interchangeable employees who could staff an industrial economy. We teach children to:

• Pass the test rather than question whether the test measures anything worth knowing

• Follow the instructions rather than notice the instructions are wrong

• Absorb the assigned material and reproduce it on demand

• Then get the job, build the career, and be stable and productive

Every one of those is a virtue in an employee. Not one of them describes an entrepreneur.

This design bias runs deeper than the classroom, found in healthcare policy I recently explored while trying to unpack why education was designed to create employees.

American employer-sponsored health insurance, the thing that keeps millions tethered to jobs they would otherwise leave, was not designed around patients. It was designed around employers. During World War II, the Stabilization Act of 1942 froze wages; the Act explicitly excluded from that freeze “insurance and pension benefits in a reasonable amount to be determined by the President.” Employers, forbidden from competing for scarce workers on salary, competed on benefits instead. The USC Schaeffer Institute documented that companies “began to offer non-wage benefits, including health insurance,” and coverage exploded, from 12 million Americans in 1940 to over 70 million a decade later. An entire pillar of American life was retrofitted into an incentive for employment.

The point is not the healthcare; the point is that our foundational systems, education included, were engineered to manufacture and retain productive employees, and they are extremely good at it.

The Dissonance Is the Tell

So we run people through a machine optimized to produce stable employees, and then a strange thing happens; they feel a tug. The machine worked, they got the degree and the job and the benefits, and something still itches. That itch is the gap between what they were trained to be and something they were never allowed to develop, and the startup boom of the last fifteen years gave the itch a name.

Suddenly, everyone wants to be an entrepreneur or wants their kid to be one.

Let me define the term the way my own work defines it, because the programs selling it rarely bother.

An entrepreneur is not a person who starts a company. An entrepreneur is a person who sees a problem and organizes resources to fix it under conditions of genuine uncertainty.

Startups are one vehicle for that; they happen to be the vehicle that generates most net new jobs, which is why they hog the spotlight. Research from the Kauffman Foundation has long shown that new and young firms, not small businesses generally and not big incumbents, account for the lion’s share of net job creation in the United States. But the entrepreneurial act is the fixing, not the incorporating. The confusion between “entrepreneur” and “startup founder” is the confusion that makes school programs fail, because they teach the vehicle and skip the driving.

A Textbook Product-Market Fit Failure

Here is what schools have actually done, described in the language of the thing they claim to teach:

1. They identified demand (“people want entrepreneurship”)

2. They built a product to match the stated demand

3. They never ran customer discovery to test whether the product produces the outcome the customer is actually buying

Parents and teenagers say they want entrepreneurship; schools happily supply a thing labeled entrepreneurship; everyone pays; and the value the customer believes they are purchasing, the capacity to actually build or fix something, is almost never in the box. It is product-market fit theater. The label matches the demand while the contents match neither.

Why is the box empty? Because what gets taught is age-inappropriate, person-inappropriate, and outcome-inappropriate, usually all three at once. Walk into a typical program and you will find two things masquerading as entrepreneurship:

• Business. The business plan, the five-year projection, the market-sizing exercise. Business is real and teachable, and we already teach it, correctly, in business classes, marketing, finance, and management. It is not entrepreneurship.

• The Silicon Valley scalable-startup framework. Usually some flavor of Lean Startup, taught as if running a build-measure-learn loop turns a sixteen-year-old into a founder. Lean Startup is genuinely useful for a specific kind of venture; the accelerator-and-scalable-startup model it belongs to is relevant to a vanishingly small fraction of the businesses any economy actually produces.

Teaching that model as the definition of entrepreneurship is like teaching Formula One pit strategy as the definition of driving.

“Startups are not small businesses. They are temporary organizations searching for scalable, repeatable, business models under conditions of genuine uncertainty.” – via Startup Ecosystems

Most students being sold “entrepreneurship” will never run one of those, and pretending otherwise wastes their time and their tuition.

Still, We Have to Teach It, Because the Alternative Is Worse

None of this is an argument to stop. It is an argument to stop doing it stupidly. Entrepreneurs fix things, startups generate the majority of net new jobs, and an economy that wants to create wealth and let people thrive in a future nobody can predict cannot afford a population that does not understand entrepreneurship. The catch, and I am being generous rather than blunt, is that the professionals who most need to understand it do not. The lawyers, the politicians, the researchers, the healthcare workers, the finance people, the software developers, and the investors who surround and shape entrepreneurship largely do not understand what they are shaping. That is the actual crisis, and it points directly at the fix.

The best thing we could do for the economy is to teach entrepreneurship seriously while being ruthlessly clear that teaching entrepreneurship does not mean teaching people to start startups. Entrepreneurship is a field of study, a specialization that attaches to other disciplines, not a factory for founders. Once you accept that, the structure practically designs itself.

First, Separate the Founders from the Field

Actually enabling founders is not a four-year degree and not a two-year minor; it is a bootcamp or an incubator. An intensive, hands-on, do-the-thing environment. Trying to credential someone into founding is a category error; you enable founding by putting people in conditions where they build, fail, and build again. Keep that separate, route your actual aspiring founders there, and stop pretending a diploma produces a founder.

Everything else, the actual field of study, sorts into three two-year tracks. And before anyone misreads it; none of this is teaching business. Business stays in business, small business, marketing, finance, and management programs where it belongs.

Three Two-Year Entrepreneur Studies

1. Understanding it (work on it). This lives inside political science, business, finance, and law, and teaches those professionals what they need to know about entrepreneurship as a phenomenon:

• The history and the psychology of it

• The difference between startups and intrapreneurship

• Why deep tech is a fundamentally different animal from a scalable software startup

• Why angel investing runs on different logic than venture capital, and why both differ from lending to a main-street business

This track produces the entrepreneur specialist. It is the lawyer who works in entrepreneurship, the city Head of Innovation who actually studied the thing they are appointed to grow, the banker or investor who can tell a restaurant loan from a seed round because they were taught the difference rather than left to guess. This is history, economics, and context.

2. Applying it (work in it). A two-year program, deliverable in K-12 at age-appropriate depth or as a college minor, built on the recognition that most people will never start a venture, but many will work inside one, where the rules are genuinely different. It overlaps with track one; you still need finance and legal minds, but the output inverts:

• Not the law firm that specializes in startups, but the legal mind who works for one

• Not the investor who understands startups, but the same finance graduate serving as VP of Finance inside one

• The salesperson, marketer, and software developer who learn to operate in a startup rather than a corporation

Let me say bluntly this observation that most keep quiet; if you are a marketer or a software developer selling yourself as someone who can do so for everyone, we both know you cannot, because working for a startup is a different world from working for an established business. The economy needs the marketing graduate with a minor in entrepreneurship, and the software engineer who is not merely a computer-science degree, but an engineer specialized for entrepreneurial environments. This is methodologies, due diligence, marketing, and psychology.

3. Studying it (work for it, on behalf of entrepreneurship). This is where the practitioners who support entrepreneurship finally get the education they have always deserved and rarely received. It belongs in:

• Healthcare, so therapists and physicians actually understand these people and the mental-health burden they carry

• Political science again, but here producing the policymaker who comprehends the downstream consequences of their regulations, incentives, and allocations of public capital

• Research, where university researchers and the economists studying this sector need to grasp how profoundly it differs from the rest of the economy

• Teaching, where the people who will impart all of this to the next cohort are trained

This is public policy, economics, history, mental health, and psychology.

How to KISS and explain this to a dean or an EDO director:

• Understand it: work on it

• Apply it: work in it

• Study it: work for it, on behalf of entrepreneurship

That is how you teach entrepreneurship. Not as how to do business, which we already teach; not as how to launch a startup, which is a bootcamp, not a curriculum. You teach it as a field, so that we produce people who support entrepreneurship, people who can work inside startups, and professionals across law, finance, government, healthcare, and research who genuinely understand the sector they keep claiming to serve.

What To Actually Do with Entrepreneurship Education

If you run a school, an economic development office, or a policy shop, the first move is diagnostic, not constructive. Before you build anything:

1. Trace a few cohorts of your existing “entrepreneurship” program. Ask whether graduates ended up more capable of fixing problems under uncertainty, or merely more fluent in business-plan vocabulary. If it is the latter, you are running a business class in a costume created to sell the seats.

2. Decide which of the three tracks you can actually staff. Most institutions can credibly teach exactly one. Pick the one that matches your faculty and your region’s real economy.

3. Route the founders themselves to an incubator, not a syllabus. Stop asking a four-year degree to do a bootcamp’s job. Better? Funnel everyone through one of the three tracks of education and make students apply to a separate “startup” program just as we require in the private sector when founders pursue an accelerator.

4. Change the metric you judge yourself by. A good program produces very few founders; judge it instead on whether it produced lawyers, financiers, civil servants, doctors, researchers, and operators who understand entrepreneurship well enough to stop actively getting in its way.

That last one costs institutions their favorite marketing line, which is exactly why it’s one of the right tracks. “We make entrepreneurs” is easy to put on a brochure and impossible to deliver. Literally impossible. You might disagree with me, and by all means, flood the comments with how wrong I am; but then take a moment and ask yourself, are we teaching how to do startups or how to start a business? That’s not entrepreneurship, call it what it is. “We produce professionals who finally understand entrepreneurship” or “we teach what it means to work with entrepreneurs” is harder to sell and is the only version that would actually help the economy.

Schools, I beg you to trust when I point out that if you actually teach entrepreneurship such as the track of applying it, so people KNOW what it means to work that way, in those environments, and then have a professionally run startup incubator available to the students from within that who qualify because of good ideas and early traction, you will better serve students and their futures, while accelerating the economy for everyone.

Question this of anyone selling or buying a school entrepreneurship program; if your program produced zero founders but every single graduate finally understood how entrepreneurship actually works, did it succeed or did it fail?

Your answer tells you whether you were ever teaching entrepreneurship or just teaching business and hoping nobody checked the box. If the program is a startup incubator or startup accelerator, you’re ignoring the psychology, history, government and civics lessons, and economics study, that is a pre-requisite of actually understanding entrepreneurship. If the question itself makes you uncomfortable about the program you’re currently running or funding, that discomfort is the most useful thing I can give you; it’s worth a conversation before the next budget cycle locks the old model in for another year.