By teaching entrepreneurship, colleges can better prepare students for a fast-changing job market and technological disruption. Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty ImagesRecent college graduates are facing a job market that’s only getting tougher. Their unemployment rate hit 5.7%, compared to 4.1% for all workers, in June 2026. That may not sound like much, but it’s one of the worst rates in the past 20 years.
Meanwhile, roughly 4 in 10 graduates are underemployed, which means they work in jobs that typically don’t require a college degree. That’s the highest rate since the COVID-19 pandemic.
As an educator for more than 25 years, I see the growing anxiety every day. In a change from years past, parents are now peppering me with questions: How can their kids leverage their college education in such a fast-changing world? Will they learn skills in school that will soon be antiquated once they graduate?
What’s essential to understand is that technology adoption cycles have accelerated at a breathtaking rate over the past few years. While the telephone and television took decades to reach 100 million users, ChatGPT and TikTok attained that threshold in a matter of months. Colleges need to adapt their curricula accordingly.
Georgia Tech, where I teach engineering, has focused on pushing entrepreneurship across our campus since 2014. We’re seeing encouraging signs from our follow-ups with graduating students that it’s helping their early careers.
I believe one of the best ways to adjust to these changes is to embed entrepreneurial experiences throughout college. Such hands-on learning, in turn, develops versatile, adaptable talent, producing graduates who can pivot across jobs as industries, technologies and opportunities evolve. And this needn’t be confined to business students – young people in all majors can benefit.
3 core lessons
The educational value of entrepreneurship isn’t principally that every student will be able to start a company. It’s that entrepreneurial experiences develop the capabilities students need in a rapidly changing economy – and ultimately build more resilient careers.
Here are some ways educators can future-proof the college experience, based on what I’ve learned and applied at Georgia Tech.
Making adaptability a core skill: Students need to learn how to be nimble. This means recognizing important changes in the landscape, identifying new problems and the opportunities they create, articulating a response and mobilizing the necessary resources. Ultimately, this approach will help students be prepared for the real world.
To impart these lessons, I believe colleges should provide hands-on opportunities to help students learn through experience before they enter the workforce. For example, they could encourage students to develop a business venture idea that addresses a newly created opportunity in the marketplace through accelerators, or short-term “boot camps” for young companies to help them grown quickly. One example is Greptile, a startup that came out of the Georgia Tech CREATE-X accelerator.
The goal isn’t that a startup will be launched – that depends on several factors coming together – but that the student gains the experience to understand a changing landscape.
Understanding customer value: Colleges can also teach students how to think about customer value – namely, why the solution they’re working on matters to the consumers buying it. This isn’t just for business students. All students can gain from learning to think about the customers or clients they will deal with in their careers. In fact, students from 38 majors have participated in the entrepreneurship programs at Georgia Tech.
Through on-the-ground experience that requires them to find customers, students can learn about the real-world impact of the products and services they create. When students spend hundreds of hours selling their young startup to the outside world, they learn to understand value at a deep level.
Emphasizing fundamentals: Fundamental skills are key because they outlast the technology underpinning the business. In fact, the more quickly specific technologies change, the more important a strong grounding in fundamentals becomes. This means it’s a smarter investment to offer, say, a fundamental course on wireless networking or deep learning concepts over a course that teaches specific wireless technologies or emphasizes the use of a specific model. A strong foundation gives students the tools to adapt to technologies that may not yet exist when they graduate.
Students in startup training have to deal with uncertainty, resource constraints and customer interaction, all of which will make them more nimble in their careers.
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The many paths toward entrepreneurship
Another great advantage of entrepreneurial experiences is that they force students to deal with uncertainty, recognize opportunities, work around resource constraints and learn how to create value.
But other strategies work as well. A few examples are project-based learning, internships and interdisciplinary capstone classes that let students pursue independent research projects as their final course.
That said, entrepreneurial experiences provide an unusually concentrated and effective environment that requires students to solve problems, engage with customers and mobilize resources they don’t directly control – all while getting real-world feedback.
More and more universities and colleges understand this point and have ramped up support for entrepreneurial activity for their students, such as Cornell and the University of Washington. At Georgia Tech, we have a playbook that we have developed through our experiences that follows the following principles:
Embed entrepreneurship into the curriculum: One simple way for colleges to incorporate entrepreneurial experiences into their coursework is to offer an entrepreneurship minor to all students, regardless of major. This would offer the opportunity to a broader range of students who otherwise might miss out.
Build a pathway to business creation: Entrepreneurial education is most effective when it leads to something bigger. To that end, many colleges are now offering a startup accelerator, including MIT, Rice University and the University of Texas.
But more is needed: A startup pathway that caters to students at all stages can substantially broaden participation and impact, regardless of whether a business results. At Georgia Tech, we have a learn/make/launch/scale pathway that offers programs and resources for learning about entrepreneurship, building solutions, launching new ventures and eventually scaling them.
Offer real venture experience: A successful model combines theoretical learning with hands-on experience. The confidence that students gain through that experience may be at least as important an educational outcome as the viability of the startups they launch. After all, since most startups tend to fail, confidence is a value that successful entrepreneurs have to sustain.
Transferring skills to the workforce
There’s another important element that’s needed: private sector partnerships. Fortunately, entrepreneurial education is well aligned with the interests of universities’ traditional corporate partners.
These companies, especially those with established, successful business models, are eager to hire students with a strong understanding of fundamentals and entrepreneurial confidence. This next generation can help the companies navigate the future.
Companies can also offer industry know-how, mentorship opportunities and financial and in-kind support. And they understand that students building a startup have to think beyond their own discipline to succeed. For example, an engineering student will need to understand customers, pricing, finance, sales, operations, intellectual property and team building. That broader perspective can make them more effective when they enter a corporate environment full time.
The same capabilities can also translate into venture creation itself: The value of entrepreneurial education can be seen across both traditional workforce pathways and startup outcomes. Our experience at Georgia Tech offers evidence of both.
Startups launched by Georgia Tech students over the past decade have crossed US$4.5 billion in aggregate total valuation and have created thousands of jobs. We’ve also found encouraging early evidence that students who gain confidence through these experiences have stronger career outcomes.
Georgia Tech isn’t alone. The University System of Georgia has recently created a new role: a chief innovation and entrepreneurial strategies officer to lead an initiative across all of the state’s public colleges and universities.
Other universities are pursuing similar paths, including the University of Virginia, Rice University and Cornell University. All now have an institutionwide leadership position focused on entrepreneurship.
Taken together, these developments suggest that educators increasingly view entrepreneurship as more than just support for students who want to start companies. These steps will help ensure that when students walk across the stage to receive their diplomas, they can meet the challenges ahead of them.
Raghupathy Sivakumar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.