Not everyone can start a business. No one wants to crush anyone’s dreams, but that’s not what this is about. Not everyone has what it takes and not everyone wants to do what it takes to start, launch, and scale a company of their own.
A recent study conducted by New York University found that the percentage of students who want to start a business actually declined whilst attending an entrepreneurship summer camp.
Shawn Osborne, the CEO of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, a nonprofit that teaches entrepreneurship to American students from low-income communities and runs the BizCamp programme, writes in Harvard Business Review about how the decrease is not a bad thing.
Before starting the BizCamp program, a whopping 91 percent of the kids enrolled said they wanted to own a business. But as they learned about the pitfalls of owning a business, there was an 85 percent decrease in the number of students who wanted to start their own company.
“I’d rather work for a company versus become an entrepreneur and try to start from the bottom because it takes a lot of hard work and it’s also work that might not pay off, and I’m not that big of a risk taker,” Osborne says one students remarked.
But there is a silver lining, Osborne says. While more students said the game wasn’t for them, the ones that did got a little bolder.
The researchers found that 38 percent of students said they are likely to start a business in the next year, compared to 25 percent of students before BizCamp.
“Lowering perceived barriers to business formation and spurring action are a very big deal. There are real market, economic, and social benefits to putting slightly fewer but better-prepared and more-motivated entrepreneurs into the business pipeline,” Osborne writes.
