Why Young Entrepreneurs Should Finish College

This article previously appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

Should entrepreneurs finish college? With rare exceptions, the short answer is “Yes.”

In my role as a professor of practice within University of California, Santa Barbara’s entrepreneurial Technology Management Program, I hear from at least one student every quarter who asks me if they should quit school to start a venture. My response is almost always the same: I think dropping out is a very bad idea.   

I have taught approximately 5,000 students during my nine-year tenure at UC Santa Barbara, some of whom went on to spawn public companies, sell their businesses for deca-millions and raise hundreds of millions of venture capital funding. However, out of this highly talented group, fewer than a dozen had created businesses while in college that I believe warranted full-time attention.

In sports, outliers generate headlines. Basketball stars LeBron James and Kobe Bryant achieved immediate success in the NBA as 18-year-olds. The same is true in business, where the startup careers of Zuckerberg, Jobs, Ellison, Gates, Branson and Dell make it seem that the path to entrepreneurial success would have been unnecessarily delayed by a college degree.

But all of those individuals missed out on material and esoteric benefits of the college experience. I recently spoke to an international group of entrepreneurship professors at San Diego State University’s Lavin Entrepreneurship Center. I asked them to devise reasons why an entrepreneur should remain in college.

Nearly all of them agreed that students should stay in school, even if their venture is doing well. Their most persuasive argument was that college offers young people many things beyond textbook facts and case studies, including:

Learning To Learn. A sound college education includes gaining insights into applying logic, researching data and assessing the veracity of information. Wise students focus on taking advantage of college to learn how to learn, rather than focusing on simply regurgitating facts.

Mini-Ventures. Remaining in college does not mean that students must put their entrepreneurial dreams on hold. Small ventures that can be run part-time allow students to gain hands-on experience. In addition, many a college venture has blossomed into a full-fledged startup after graduation.

Discovery of What You DON’T Want to Do. College affords students a chance to satisfy their curiosity by exploring areas of intellectual interest and learning not only what they want to do with their lives, but also what they don’t want to do. Once a student enters the work world, she loses this luxury of time and flexibility.

Peer Management. Group projects, albeit painful, are an extremely effective proving ground for a startup career. In their early stages, startups are generally meritocracies in which strong-willed, highly-opinionated people must be encouraged to act in a certain way, rather than ordered to do so. College group projects force students to develop a diplomatic leadership style, in order to encourage their peers (whom they cannot order around) to accept their suggestions.

Networks. Colleges are populated by motivated individuals, many of whom will excel in their chosen fields. Young entrepreneurs can call upon their alumni networks for advice, recruitment of key employees and even funding.

Resources. Many campuses offer entrepreneurial students a variety of free resources, such as incubators, accelerators, mentor programs, venture competitions (with meaningful prize money) and even seed funding.

Maturity.  A significant amount of emotional growth occurs between the ages 18 and 22. For many people who do not enter college after graduation, a stint in the military or Peace Corps allows them to develop emotionally and gain valuable, real-world experiences. The same is true of a college education, which provides young people with a safe environment to learn from their mistakes.

I ask my ambitious students to remember that the dropouts who’ve done well are the exception, not the rule. They’ll be better entrepreneurs eventually, with better-developed products, for using college as a time of exploration and testing their ideas with a safety net in place.