College students vying to be entrepreneurs, on rise

Kansas City: A new study has revealed that graduates in the U.S. are increasingly showing interest in business and entrepreneurship. The study called 'Trends in Business Interest Among U.S. College Students' is released by Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in conjunction with Global Entrepreneurship Week, according to Kauffman Foundation's official website.

The study bases its findings on data available through the Cooperative Institutional Research Program, which for 40 years has conducted the CIRP Freshman Survey, the most ubiquitous survey of college freshmen in the United States.

Among its findings, the study revealed that, through the 1970s and early to mid-1980s, the numbers of students that listed "business owner or proprietor" as their intended career of choice trended upward, peaking in 1987 at 3.7 percent. The category then dropped to a low of 2.2 percent in 1993 before beginning an upward climb to 3.6 percent in 2005. In 2008, 3.3 percent of students chose "business owner or proprietor" as their preferred career.

"This report lets us look over time at the interest of college freshmen in different aspects of business, and we see a great deal of variation," said E.J. Reedy, Manager of Research & Policy at the Kauffman Foundation, who conducted the research with CIRP Director John H. Pryor. "Given the tumultuous environment during the recession and constantly shifting public attitudes toward business, it will be very interesting to see what happens to career interests and aspirations of freshmen in the future. In the current economy, given the increasing availability of entrepreneurship courses on campuses, trends toward outsourcing, and unemployment among youth, we would expect to see rising interest in business ownership, but the assault on business principals has been fairly intensive."

The CIRP data show that only 0.5 percent of women wanted to be business owners or proprietors in 1976. This number rose to two percent in 2008. While the rising female interest in entrepreneurship quadrupled when examined as a level, the differential interest by gender actually is larger at the end of the period (2.8 percent) than at the beginning (2.2 percent).

Examined by race, the data reveals that, in the late 1980s, black freshmen started to become the predominant group (proportionally) to express interest in business ownership. Surpassing white students, who previously represented the largest category of those who expressed interest in owning businesses, black students continued to widen the lead from the 1990s onwards.

Though in 2008 relatively few first-year students chose "business owner or proprietor" as their preferred career choice, many more (43.3 percent) reported that becoming successful in a business of their own was essential or very important. In 1984, this item's importance peaked at 51.2 percent.

The discrepancy between those who view success in their own business as essential or very important and those who say they will choose a career as a business owner or proprietor indicates that students view the two items differently, Reedy said.

"Some students will choose careers that are closely associated with disciplinary study, such as law or medicine," Reedy said. "They may not view these areas as a means to business ownership, even though many of these students ultimately may be business owners in their chosen fields. We can speculate that the narrower career choice option could capture those who see themselves as future business owners, while the 'success in my own business' category captures those with overall tendencies toward seeking success."

The research also found that men have been more likely than women over the last 38 years to consider success in their own businesses as essential or very important. The gap has been narrowing since the mid-1980s. However, over the last 37 years, black students have been more likely than other racial groups to report that entrepreneurial success was essential or very important. Asian and Hispanic students show comparable values, and white students have consistently placed lower importance on this item. Also, students are far more likely to come from a family with a father as a business owner than a mother.