By Sarah Pinkerton | Staff Writer
For over a decade, the Baylor Entrepreneurship program has been ranked in the top 10 by the Princeton Review. 2021 adds another year to this list as Baylor was recently listed as number seven out of 50 in the nation by The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur Magazine.
There is a feature article on the rankings in the December issue of Entrepreneur magazine that was released on Tuesday.
More than 300 undergraduate and graduate schools were considered for this ranking, and administrators were asked to complete a survey about entrepreneurship at the institution.
The methodology for selection was based on academics, students and faculty, alumni ventures, learning outside the classroom, competitions hosted by the institution and scholarships and aid.
Dr. Kendall Artz, associate chair of the department of entrepreneurship and professor of entrepreneurship, said it’s an overall assessment of the program.
“The overall strength of one’s program,” he said, “and the reputation and, you know, the creativity and innovativeness with which you approach developing a curriculum.”
Dr. Peter Klein, entrepreneurship department chair and W.W. Caruth chair, said the Baylor Entrepreneurship program has also been ranked in the top 10 by the U.S. News in recent years as well.
“We’ve been doing [Entrepreneurship] for a long time,” Klein said. “It’s kind of a signature area for the business school, so it gets a lot of support from the university.”
Artz said that as one of the first three Entrepreneurship programs in the country, beginning in 1977, Baylor’s is one of the oldest and most respected programs in the country.
Klein said that Baylor is one of the few business schools that has an entrepreneurship program.
“I think that gives our program a lot of visibility,” he said. “We have a dozen or so professors who all they do is teach entrepreneurship, do research on entrepreneurship, so we really have a strong core area of faculty, staff and students who are dedicated.”
Artz said there around 170 students who are currently majoring in Entrepreneurship at Baylor.
“We have an Entrepreneurship minor also for all non-BBA,” he said. “We have about roughly 150 Entrepreneurship minors too.”
There is also a Ph.D program in Entrepreneurship Studies.
He said there was a large increase in Entrepreneurship students for a period of time, but enrollment has now flattened out.
“Data shows that about 10% of the population is really entrepreneurial. That’s what they really want to do is work for themselves,” he said. “And we’re at about 10% or 12% of the student body in the business school, and so we expect our numbers will probably stay relatively constant.”
He said that he feels entrepreneurship is for students that are highly motivated to “control their own destinies.”
“They’re not comfortable seeing themselves working for another company for the rest of their lives,” he said. “What they want to do is they want to chart their own path and are willing to take the risks and be accountable for their own decisions and their own successes and their own failures.”
Klein said that as famous entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk remain widely admired and known in our society, he feels they drive the economy forward and make our society better.
“There’s this growing recognition in society that entrepreneurship is something really important,” he said. “Something we ought to know about — something we ought to treat carefully and so forth.”
