Why do you have a job? That is the question I posed to people I was having dinner with recently.

Both of the people I dined with were young graduate degree holders.  Both of them expressed disappointment with their current employment situation.  So I wondered why they were not taking advantage of their education and the current economic/political climate to start some venture of their own, even if it does not mean immediately quitting their day jobs.  Well at least one of the people at the table reminded me of the classic response, which is fear.  I wonder though, what are most people afraid of?  Afraid of failure?  Afraid of hard work?  Afraid of the unknown?  There could be a dozen things one could be afraid of, but I don’t understand the fear when you have nothing to lose.  Starting a business does not mean large expenditures or quitting your current job with no reliable income.  The only thing there is to sacrifice is your “free time” (if you are not happy with your position in life and successful, by your own definition of the word…you really should not have any “free time”)and a couple hundred dollars in filing fees.  Since I started my own company the amount of personal leisure time that I have has dramatically decreased, but in only a few months I have turned the corner and I can see the light and the light looks good.  Being an entrepreneur is by far one of the most rewarding journeys I have begun.  I look forward to the day when I am no longer an employee and I am rewarded solely based on my skill and hard work.

College education is surely a major factor in the lack of entrepreneurial spirit in recent generations.

Think about it, in the past when the majority of US citizens barely had a high school education practically everyone owned a business or they worked for a family member who did own a business.  As college educations become more common the idea of dedicating your life to working for someone else has also become more common.  Colleges today train us to have a corporate mentality, it prepares us to work for a company that is going to assign us an employee ID number.   Gone are the days when college was about training students to think critically and grow into a free thinking individual.  Today college seems to be high school 2.0. What high school 2.0 means is that they now have mandatory attendance, classwork, homework, assigned seating, etc.  Based on stories from my parents and what I have learned from media produced 20 or 30 years ago, college was not always like a big high school.  There used to be a time when you were personally responsible for your success of failure; if you didn’t want to go to class that was fine, there was no homework that was graded, there were no campus curfews, etc.  It seems to me that many colleges today are not allowing students the freedom and lack of structure required to discover or to develop their creativity.  You can’t teach creativity, but you can definitely stifle its development when you remove the ability to take classes outside of the required curriculum for your chosen degree, and when you grade based upon following a prescribed methodology, instead of letting students find their own methodology to solve the problem.  See that to me is the difference between college today and how it was when my parents were students.  Back then students were given theory, and a problem and told to find the solution, now students are given procedures, and a problem and told to find the solution by memorizing and following the procedures.  According to my father, who holds a Master’s Degree, a Ph.d, and a Juris Doctorate Degree; when he was in college they were not graded on homework, classwork, and such; as I was… rather they were graded on the exams taken and the papers they wrote, there was no mandatory attendance, but you were simply responsible for obtaining the knowledge you needed for success.  I can even see how the system tightened its belt while I was in college, as I made my way through college, both the school and  the state (Florida) passed legislation which made it more difficult to take elective courses outside of your major course of study.  I understand that some people abuse the system by taking an excessive number of electives.  I found myself frustrated when I wanted to enroll in an elective course and found it open only to those in a certain major.  What happened to the days my parents spoke of when they talk about all the electives they took that were wildly unrelated to their major?  I can say that my elective courses gave me more of the world, and opened my eyes to things in ways that my Computer Information Systems, and Engineering courses never could have.  You may ask how I got into discussing college education, and I will close the loop by re-emphasizing my earlier statement, the highly regimented lifestyle of current collegiate institutions is nothing more than high school 2.0, without the freedom to become responsible for your own education and your own future and the ability to learn things outside of your major course of study you are just another student ID matriculating into a role where you are just another empl ID.  Sure, freedom means that more people will fail due to lack of self control, but those are the same people who will either mature later and resume their education, or they will go into the workforce and become that below average employee who we all hate to interact with.

Perhaps the extremely high student loan debt accrued by students today is partly to blame.

Our parents’ generation were able to weasel out of paying a lot of their student loan debt because the laws were more relaxed, I think in many cases if you didn’t repay after 7 or 10 years nothing happened, but today credit scores are ruined, law suits are filed, and you can go to jail if you don’t repay your loans in full.  On top of that, public colleges are charging rates in the range of $100-200 per credit hour for in state students and $500-700 per hour for out of state students.  It is easy to graduate with a Bachelor’s Degree and a bonus of $30,000-50,000 in debt.  With that type of debt, and only six months to begin repayment students don’t have time to start a business from the ground.   The smart kids will start their business during their junior or senior year, and hopefully by graduation they will be profitable, I only wish I had such forethought when I was 21-22 years old.  The other solution is that student loans have a 12-18 month grace period before re-payments begin.  With a year or more to float it gives graduates enough time to try their hand at entrepreneurship, and if they are not quite profitable after a year they have another six months to find a job to supplement their business revenue.

Every college should have a freshman level class which teaches all the basic skills required to run a small business.

Practical knowledge such as basic book keeping, human resource management,  invoicing, supply chain management, and some basic business legal contracts.  If colleges really want to produce a well rounded product… I meant student, they should teach a bit less of “How to work for someone else” and a little more entrepreneurship.  That is of course in addition to more flexibility in elective courses and personal responsibility for each student’s own success.  Even though past generations attended college their entrepreneurial spirit was not killed, there is something going on in higher education today that is stripping students of their desire to go forth and create.  Many of the companies we feign to work for were created by either  college degree holders of our parents’ generation or college dropouts from  my own generation.  For some reason the major success stories of my generation have been  made by those who dropped out or never went to college at all.  This furthers my case that college has to play a major role in our dependency on employers.

What do you think is the reason that college graduates for the late 1970′s generations and younger are hesitant to venture out on their own?