lawyer

#5 Questions to Ask When Choosing an MBA Entrepreneurship Program - US News

How a program integrates hands-on learning opportunities into the curriculum can vary, experts say.

Attending business school has traditionally been a way to advance in the ranks of an established company, but recently more students are electing to work for themselves soon after getting their degree.

Forty-five percent of alumni entrepreneurs from the classes of 2010-2013 started businesses at graduation, as compared with just 7 percent of alumni entrepreneurs who graduated before 1990, according to a March report from the Graduate Management Admission Council.

Many students in MBA programs select entrepreneurship as their focus to better prepare themselves for being employers, investors, inventors and other necessary roles that keep the world of entrepreneurship spinning.

Experts say learning opportunities available vary at different schools, but programs with a strong entrepreneurial focus will have common traits. Prospective MBA students who are trying to figure out which of these programs will best prepare them can ask admissions officers, students or other experts a few targeted questions.

1. Is entrepreneurship an official track or concentration? A school that has entrepreneurship as a designated area of study may treat this area of business more seriously than schools that don't. That in and of itself says there's some commitment by the school in this area,” says Jeffrey Robinson, the academic director for the Center of Urban Entrepreneurship and Economic Development at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey .

At the business school, MBA students can select entrepreneurship as a concentration and take required courses as well as electives such as Technology Ventures and Social Entrepreneurship.

Robinson, whose first business included selling CDs, records and cassette tapes as a Rutgers undergrad, encourages students to also ask if their school of interest has a center for entrepreneurship.

Centers are good at a few things, he says. One of them is coordinating activities from inside and outside of the school.

A center establishes a point of contact for all entrepreneurial efforts, such as competitions or successful alumni who want to speak with current students. Prospective students can't assume that a faculty member or department will just pitch in to help organize these efforts, Robinson says.

2. How is entrepreneurship taught? Learning about entrepreneurship is different from learning other subjects, says Helena Yli-Renko, an associate professor and the director of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business .

You can’t learn it through textbooks and exams, she says. It really requires some experiential learning.

The center has five different venture competitions, an incubator and a summer accelerator that complement the range of courses available to students.

Look at the breadth of the program and the offerings and the ability to tailor it to your needs, says Yli-Renko.

3. Who are the faculty? A program that’s showing its commitment has full-time faculty and part-time faculty who are specialists in this area, says Robinson, who's also an associate professor at Rutgers. Some schools may only have full-time faculty while others may only have part-time faculty. But a mixture of traditional academics and teachers with solid hands-on experience creates a more balanced setting, he says.

4. If you're coming in with a business idea, what kind of support can the faculty provide? Some students start an entrepreneurship program with an idea for a product or service they'd like to launch or are currently getting off the ground. A good program will be able to assist them, experts say.

At the College of Business and Behavioral Science at Clemson University, students can pursue an MBAe – an MBA with a concentration in entrepreneurship and innovation – and take advantage of the Clemson Apparel Research organization or the engineering school to create products.

We have all the resources to prototype just about any idea, says Matthew Klein, business development director for the MBA program.