Educators are thinking of every student -- even those pursuing a liberal arts education -- as an entrepreneur (see BW Online, 10/28/05, "The Startup Bug Strikes Earlier"). In the years since the dot-com bust, top schools may have quit giving lots of early seed money to students, says Ken Zolot, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. But they're teaching all their students to think entrepreneurially, a skill members of the next generation will need to succeed in the corporate world, even if they never expect to be their own boss.

FROM AGRICULTURE TO ART.

"Every company, large or small, needs innovation to survive today. An entrepreneur is by definition an owner and a manager," says Bob Joss, dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "They bring that element of ownership and responsibility to the company, while driving innovation from within." Now students are picking up the ownership mentality through all sorts of methods -- from entrepreneurship minors for nonbusiness students to team-based action learning (see BW Online slide show, 10/28/05, "Entrepreneurs: Cream of the Young Crop").

Across the country, more young people than ever are being exposed to entrepreneurial thinking. In the early 1990s fewer than 300 colleges or universities offered courses in entrepreneurship, says Paul Magelli, director of the Academy of Entrepreneurial Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Today, about two-thirds of the 2,000 colleges or universities that offer some sort of entrepreneurship education provide relevant courses outside of their business school, in disciplines ranging from agriculture to fine arts, according to recent research by Magelli's academy in collaboration with the E. Marion Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City group. Recently the team found that 186 four-year institutions are offering courses in entrepreneurship designed for students outside of business schools.

MORE THAN A TRADE.

Although schools are still acting as business incubators, they support fewer student-run companies than before the dot-com bust, says Zolot. These incubators are often part of a center for entrepreneurship that encourages more academic research about the topic as a way of increasing legitimacy.

Many in the academic world never thought of entrepreneurship as anything more than a trade. In addition, more tenured faculty members are turning their attention to entrepreneurship, whereas adjuncts mostly covered the subject in the past, says Murray Low, executive director of the Lang Center for Entrepreneurship at Columbia Business School in New York.

Educators are advising students to do hands-on projects while in school and spend time working for someone else in the corporate world before launching their own businesses. And this way of thinking is spreading across the campus.

ALTERNATIVE PATH.

In the spring of 2004, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill set out to make sweeping changes with the arrival of the Carolina Entrepreneurship Initiative, a series of programs designed to change the way students think. The program includes offering faculty fellowships to encourage richer academic research on entrepreneurship. Undergraduates in liberal arts courses can now sign on for a minor in either social or commercial entrepreneurship, and the school will soon offer artistic and scientific entrepreneurship minors as well.

Budding artists and scientists are encouraged to think innovatively -- and to understand how their work can be turned into a venture. Part of the motivation is to give students, regardless of their interest in business, an alternative career path.

Anyone with a dream can take charge and launch his own business, whereas some people might feel shut out of the corporate culture, says John D. Kasarda, director of the Carolina Entrepreneurship Initiative and a professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC. Institutions like UNC have many reasons for turning to entrepreneurship in their quest to provide the best education. For starters, when students graduate, they face a different corporate landscape than the generations before them did.

"LESS DAUNTING."

After the September 11 terrorist attacks, ethics scandals, and the growth of outsourcing, people are finding that they have to make opportunities for themselves. School is the perfect haven for students to test their wings and fly.

That's certainly true for Jason Miller, a 26-year-old, second-year MBA student at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He's developing a business idea that would help flight attendants earn more money by selling advertising and promotions to passengers, thanks to a $1,000 Dare to Dream grant from the Zell Lurie Institute of Entrepreneurship at Michigan. "Being in school for this makes all the stages a lot less daunting," says Miller.

Entrepreneurial thinking gives students the chance to take charge of their own destiny -- and build a career that includes making a difference in society. "I'm 57, and my students are in their 20s, and they'll live in a very different world than the one I know," says Christopher Pratt, dean of Career Education at Columbia University. "It's important for us to help our students think outside of themselves."

AIDING THE SPIRIT.

Today's students don't just need to consider the rest of the world -- they need to see it for themselves. One of the programs that Pratt, an American of Scottish descent, helped organize includes high school, undergraduate, and graduate students joining forces with faculty to learn from the owners of small to midsize businesses in Scotland over the course of eight weeks in the summer. This kind of program is intended for students to begin to understand the global marketplace that they'll confront in their careers.

Still, one of the most valuable parts of the campus experience for the entrepreneurially minded is the built-in networks that now extend beyond the business school. At the Franklin W. Olin School of Business at Babson College, entrepreneurial students have started working with neighboring Olin College of Engineering. Jim Poss, a 2003 Babson MBA graduate, met two sophomore engineering students from Olin who helped him design a solar-powered trash compactor for Seahorse Power, a business that Poss founded and now runs full time.

But can you really teach entrepreneurship, something that's often thought of as a gut instinct? Educators say yes. Aspiring business owners can pick up everything from financing to marketing in a classroom -- even if the spirit ultimately comes from within, says Ellen A. Rudnick, executive director and clinical professor at the Michael P. Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago. And a college campus, full of eager young people open to new ideas, is the ultimate breeding ground for innovators.