Wharton Prof Sees Advantages of For-Credit Student Entrepreneurship
A noted Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania professor recently penned an article for the Wall Street Journal on the merits of allowing students to start their own businesses.
Karl Ulrich is Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions at the college, and he also serves as Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
Ulrich acknowledges the frustration that professors experience “who see their students paying little attention to classroom learning while they focus on creating the next Uber.” The issue, he believes, is that students are seeking to bridge the divide between the theories that they study and their real world applications.
He writes, “Students want to focus their energies on, for instance, developing a pricing strategy for their startup, at the expense of doing a homework assignment on pricing for their marketing class. Both experiences can teach students about pricing, but the startup pricing challenge is both more nuanced than the homework assignment, and instills a greater desire to learn.”
Ulrich describes a class at Wharton in which several dozen student entrepreneurs are grouped together, and are given the opportunity to earn course credit focused on the development of their own startups. Throughout the semester, the professor devotes class sessions to corresponding steps in the development of the students’ businesses. “For instance,” he notes, “a module on estimating price elasticity supports a more general class discussion on pricing. These modules both ensure a consistent high-quality academic experience and allow disciplinary experts to support a large number of students cost effectively.”
The benefit of this method isn’t only valuable to students, but to teachers as well, as they put the relevance of their scholarship to the test.
About the Author
Maggie Boccella
Maggie Boccella, a lifelong resident of Philadelphia, is a freelance writer, artist and photographer. She has consulted on various film and multimedia projects, and she also serves as a juror for the city's annual LGBTQIA Film Festival.
