Vt. colleges top Forbes most entrepreneurial list
By Lola Duffort
STAFF WRITER | August 05,2015
Two Vermont colleges that topped a Forbes magazine list for the country’s most entrepreneurial schools are pointing to their hands-on, individualized approaches to explain the recognition.
An article in Forbes magazine on Wednesday ranked colleges in the U.S. according to their “entrepreneurial ratios” — the number of past and current students who identified themselves as business owners or founders, divided by the school’s total student body. Forbes ranked research universities and smaller colleges separately.
Middlebury College and Bennington College, both small, private, liberal arts colleges in south and central Vermont, nearly topped that list. Middlebury came in second, behind ultra-selective New York City art school Cooper Union. Bennington followed closely behind, at number four.
At Middlebury, entrepreneurship is “an opportunity to in a sense rediscover the global liberal arts in this complicated century,” said Middlebury Center for Social Entrepreneurship director Jonathan Isham Jr.
At Middlebury, students are tasked with considering systemic problems, given fellowships or grants, and then partner with networks of global governmental and nongovernmental institutions in order to address them.
He calls social entrepreneurship a “Trojan horse” that gets students thinking about the age-old liberal arts questions — “Who am I? What am I becoming? What is a life well lived?”
Middlebury’s CSE also partners with the school’s Programs on Creativity and Innovation, which offers students a bevy of curricular and co-curricular resources and programs to help them in their entrepreneurial endeavors. They include MiddStart, a crowdfunding platform which taps Middlebury’s alumni community, and MiddEntrepreneurs, a month-long course where students draw up a business plan — and then pitch the idea to actual investors. There’s also the Old Stone Mill — a space students can use for anything from making art to taking orders on their fledgling skiwear business.
Bennington College president Mariko Silver said it’s no accident the college was ranked so highly: Entrepreneurship is “fundamental” to Bennington’s design.
“Bennington is about pushing the envelope, but also pushing students to explore what they’re interested in and what they love,” she said.
Much the way graduate students typically pursue their degrees, Bennington students design their own courses of study — and then defend their decisions to a panel of professors. Students also have to think about where their interests are reflected in the real world, and what kind of jobs they translate to.
“And every year, every student has to find that job, get that job, and do that job,” Silver said.
Each year, students spend a seven-week term in the winter — called Field Work Terms — working a job that complements their studies. Field Work Terms can occasionally be independent studies, but are most often jobs or internships in areas of interest.
Bennington students can also take advantage of such offerings as Future Studio, a year-long class that its professor, multimedia artist Robert Ransick, describes as a “hybrid between a start-up and a creative studio.”
There, students are tasked with identifying a social problem, thinking up a product that addresses it, building a prototype, and drawing up a business plan.
Ransick said he modeled the class on Bennington’s general approach to education, which he says is “inherently entrepreneurial” in that it asks students where they want to go — and then tells them to draw the roadmap.
“As every entrepreneur knows, nobody hands you a list of instructions,” he said.
By Lola Duffort
STAFF WRITER | August 05,2015
Two Vermont colleges that topped a Forbes magazine list for the country’s most entrepreneurial schools are pointing to their hands-on, individualized approaches to explain the recognition.
An article in Forbes magazine on Wednesday ranked colleges in the U.S. according to their “entrepreneurial ratios” — the number of past and current students who identified themselves as business owners or founders, divided by the school’s total student body. Forbes ranked research universities and smaller colleges separately.
Middlebury College and Bennington College, both small, private, liberal arts colleges in south and central Vermont, nearly topped that list. Middlebury came in second, behind ultra-selective New York City art school Cooper Union. Bennington followed closely behind, at number four.
At Middlebury, entrepreneurship is “an opportunity to in a sense rediscover the global liberal arts in this complicated century,” said Middlebury Center for Social Entrepreneurship director Jonathan Isham Jr.
At Middlebury, students are tasked with considering systemic problems, given fellowships or grants, and then partner with networks of global governmental and nongovernmental institutions in order to address them.
He calls social entrepreneurship a “Trojan horse” that gets students thinking about the age-old liberal arts questions — “Who am I? What am I becoming? What is a life well lived?”
Middlebury’s CSE also partners with the school’s Programs on Creativity and Innovation, which offers students a bevy of curricular and co-curricular resources and programs to help them in their entrepreneurial endeavors. They include MiddStart, a crowdfunding platform which taps Middlebury’s alumni community, and MiddEntrepreneurs, a month-long course where students draw up a business plan — and then pitch the idea to actual investors. There’s also the Old Stone Mill — a space students can use for anything from making art to taking orders on their fledgling skiwear business.
Bennington College president Mariko Silver said it’s no accident the college was ranked so highly: Entrepreneurship is “fundamental” to Bennington’s design.
“Bennington is about pushing the envelope, but also pushing students to explore what they’re interested in and what they love,” she said.
Much the way graduate students typically pursue their degrees, Bennington students design their own courses of study — and then defend their decisions to a panel of professors. Students also have to think about where their interests are reflected in the real world, and what kind of jobs they translate to.
“And every year, every student has to find that job, get that job, and do that job,” Silver said.
Each year, students spend a seven-week term in the winter — called Field Work Terms — working a job that complements their studies. Field Work Terms can occasionally be independent studies, but are most often jobs or internships in areas of interest.
Bennington students can also take advantage of such offerings as Future Studio, a year-long class that its professor, multimedia artist Robert Ransick, describes as a “hybrid between a start-up and a creative studio.”
There, students are tasked with identifying a social problem, thinking up a product that addresses it, building a prototype, and drawing up a business plan.
Ransick said he modeled the class on Bennington’s general approach to education, which he says is “inherently entrepreneurial” in that it asks students where they want to go — and then tells them to draw the roadmap.
“As every entrepreneur knows, nobody hands you a list of instructions,” he said.
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