Summary

• Entrepreneurship could be the next big hit like co-operative education
• Reimagining it will take rethinking curricular design
• Student associations can help shape the transition through envisioning what they want, building partnerships, and advocating
• The best kind of entrepreneurship for student associations to teach is mergers and acquisitions

The University of Waterloo seems to be having a bit of a moment. A national darling that turns out the people that Canada can’t afford to lose and wants to retain, the home of hustle culture and side projects, a co-op model that while it didn’t originate, it scaled better than any other university in Canada, providing affordability in the near-term and significant human capital development by weaving together classwork and practical application. The model took a few decades to take off, and the intense grade cutoffs now associated with many of its flagship engineering programs are more recent than some people seem to think. But now, it’s a model that many universities are trying to emulate, and the competition for limited jobs will get more intense. But Waterloo’s first-mover advantage looms large. So… what’s next?

It needn’t be Waterloo, but if any school, university or college can lock down the “next co-op”, they’d undoubtedly be able to drive massive success for themselves. It is this unfortunate thinking that risks higher education leaders within institutions to engage in what might be called gadgetbahn thinking. Trying to sell government on funding the next big thing is a past-time and mode of thinking to which I am not immune, so I hope that I can be indulged as I do the search, but if properly executed, it may not need government intervention at all, and stand more independently and even in a student-supported position, like the original Waterloo co-op implementation.

Global initiation of gadgetbahns is led by German student unions.

Dino Dynamism Hunting

The federal environment right now is very concerned with economic dynamism, from trying to raise domestic investment, firm formation, and improving GDP per capita, while fighting sclerosis of leaning on only the past generation of industries. This year’s Hunter Prize is basically aimed squarely at this question, looking for direct policy tools to drive dynamism.

If universities and colleges are hotbeds of new ideas and skills transfer, I argue that entrepreneurship could be the next co-op. Recent data from a survey I worked on at my old employer, CASA, has recently come out showing that at 24% of students are very interested in either starting or acquiring a business, and a solid 41% more have a good deal of interest.

Converting 100% of those interested people is impossible, but institutions probably should be thinking about forging some of that raw interest into business-ready graduates, for no other reason than hoping for more wealthy alumni to petition for a couple million dollars to rename a building or something (though maybe they should invest in making it cheaper to make new building signs?).

Perhaps one could argue that the role of increasing entrepreneurship is something one can leave to organizations like Futurpreneur, and I suspect that they are a big part of the broader picture, but post-secondary institutions can probably be doing more to prep people for success, or perhaps figuring ways to actively thrust people into that space.

Pastpreneur, a predecessor of Futurpreneur, was far less successful at cultivation of new firms.

Replicating the co-op formula, with a double hitch

What makes co-op successful? In my mind, it is a multi-factor recipe, one that involves increasing short-term affordability for students, increasing long-term human capital in one’s graduates, meeting an unmet need in society, marrying curriculum and curricular design with the experience, and, perhaps unfortunately, getting students invested by making them co-investors in the programming.

Entrepreneurship can easily increase one’s long-term human capital with a set of skills that are hard to gain elsewhere, entrepreneurship meets an unmet need in society, and it can be both married to curricular design and to student co-investment, if done right. The hitch is the short-term affordability, as businesses can take many years to succeed, if they succeed at all. In fact, starting a business might push a student to invest their own money and come out at a greater loss than if they never participated at all. The hitch then is institutions and their student associations figuring out ways to bridge the affordability and capital gaps.

Notably, while entrepreneurship isn’t a listed high-impact practice, it is likely something that students will see high-value in, especially if they are sold on not just direct benefits with regard to starting businesses, but also that it might set them up better to be a manager or project manager in the future.

Also famously, entrepreneurs are very good at community altruism, and many examples exist of them giving large sums to their student unions, like M.T. Pakats giving $5 million to the Mount Allison Student Union in 2006.

What is currently lacking?

There’s a bevy of barriers to starting a new business, according to an Angus Reid poll. Hard to fix “make a living”, but institutions can and do teach marketing, and could offer navigatory services to help understand regulatory requirements or find government funding.

There may be core skills like numeracy in the accounting or business modelling context, marketing skills, or ability to go through a business planning process.

I acknowledge before we proceed that incubators exist, but I think I’m looking for something one step down in intensity, and one step away in terms of how “techy” something needs to be, as incubators often seem VC-oriented.

It is rare for students to earn a Victoria Cross for entrepreneurship, there are no documented cases happening after the second world war.

Models for post-secondary integration

An entrepreneurship degree in the vein of co-op

Thinking more deeply about non-traditional sequencing in the academy, one could imagine designing a program that, while not centered around entrepreneurship, is an entrepreneurship variant of an existing degree. At Waterloo, one could earn a Bachelor’s degree in Science, or a Bachelor’s Degree in Science (co-op), that is longer and has specified periods in the sequence for co-op programs. Imagine a Bachelor of Science (entr.), which is designed to develop the skills in the discipline alongside entrepreneurship. This would dovetail especially well with taking a few gap years to get foundational skills in the industry as well.

What could this look like?

Imagine a degree where you opt into the entrepreneurship stream at the end of the first year, and if so, face an expanded curriculum that involves additional courses in business planning, accounting, entrepreneurship, an interview seminar with people in businesses in the field, marketing and HR. At the end of the third year, you have the strongly-encouraged option to leave the program early to start a business, supported by centralized university supports for incorporation, mentorship and grant-seeking. After a minimum of two years and maximum of five, you have three choices. The first is to pay the value of the fourth year of the degree, but doesn’t participate in any more courses, forfeiting the degree. The second is to pay the full amount, do a single reflection course, and do a number of mentorship hours. The third option is to come back for a fourth year at 1/2 the cost of tuition, essentially a “sorry you failed” option. In the second or third case, you also get another 3 years of supports if you want to continue/revive your business, or take a 2nd kick at the can.

You would have the option to not use the support services that you paid termly for over your 2nd and 3rd year, but if you do choose to use them, you’d also give up a small equity stake in your company, something like 2.5%.

Ideally, services would also include trying to get an endowment to do some loan guarantees to lending institutions for businesses that are slightly outside their risk profile, as well as prizes for best business case or something of that ilk.

An integrated curriculum

This is less groundbreaking, but looks much more like tacking on an entrepreneurship concentration within any given credential, ideally tailoring it to the particularities of the businesses that alumni typically go into or found. In this sense, this option may be especially well-suited to college programming, where jobs to be pursued may be less abstract than in some university programming.

While not necessarily integrating years or terms to entrepreneurship directly, there could be competitions or capstones that might involve elements of business planning. Nothing prevents doing the same kind of support services, though it feels less necessary in this context.

The Golden Ticket

I think that the real golden ticket would be the benevolence of a benefactor in the same industry as the students, and development of a sectoral business acquisition apprenticeship, where either during a 3+1 degree or after graduation, students are paired with an existing business owner to learn the business over the course of the next 5 years, and then transition to buying the business using their saved earnings and a low interest lean facilitated by a financial institution and subsidized by the benefactor’s funding, again possibly with a small equity stake. One could imagine this in something like a veterinary program, any health sciences program or in pre-apprenticeship building trades programs, for example, but it could possibly be expanded to something like a modern languages program for people to take over translating businesses, or certain engineering subdisciplines or music or accounting or food sciences.

The Golden Ticket is especially good for confectionary studies, a small unannounced subprogram within the Food Studies programming at Olds College.

What’s in it for student associations

Waterloo’s students essentially agreed to support the co-operative program, at least in part. The Tatham Centre, which houses much of the infrastructure for the co-operative education program was a gift from the students to the university, funded by their fees, and greatly improved the quality of the services provided. And, since the start, the co-op program has charged its participants fees to support the operation of the program. But should student associations do so again?

Vision

One thing that student associations could do is articulate a vision for what kind of programming they’d like to see. If they see a groundswell of interest in entrepreneurship, as the survey data shows, then they should ask for more options for program-specific entrepreneurship content.

Research

Obviously, one thing that could be done is trying to research and collect in a systematic way the evidence on entrepreneurship as a quasi-high impact practice, and find best practices and discuss those internally within the institution. Kudos to OUSA, ever the expansive policy-thinkers, who have a start on research and policy work here.

Direct Services

Direct services are another contender. Things like entrepreneurship mentoring need not be run directly by the institution, and if there’s no club well-suited, then student associations could go out soliciting donations or partnerships to run such a service, if they chose.

Government Advocacy

I know I bemoaned this thinking early on, but if institutions are not going to promote things themselves, student associations can go off on their own to change the incentive structure for institutions through advocacy, including possible government funding for student entrepreneurship clinics, something I imagine could be a nice little angle for student associations operating in conservative political contexts.

Alternatively, they could look toward securing funding for entrepreneurship organizations, or starting their own and providing services funded by government, possibly as a national partnership between associations, or as a sub-service of a supraunion. This is an option best used if they don’t find a suitable existing federal body, which brings us to:

Partnerships

Student associations can act as conveners, talking to different people in the ecosystem, not just students or institutions or Futurpreneur, but also organizations like chambers of commerce, entrepreneurship networks, incubators and industry groups.

Partnerships and collaborations rarely come full-baked out of the blue, but usually out of dialogue and realization of mutual opportunity. Facilitating that dialogue might be incredibly valuable for student associations.

Incubating on their own

Nothing prevents a student union from running their own entrepreneurship or business plan contests, softly encouraging individuals to start businesses, not even providing services, per se.

So, that’s the conclusion, that student associations should start their own savings and loan societies.