Miami's entrepreneurship program ranks among highest in the nation

From over 2,000 schools surveyed by The Princeton Review for Entrepreneur magazine, Miami University's entrepreneurship program ranks 15th in the country for undergraduate programs.

“We give students hands-on, experiential learning,” says Brett Smith, director of Miami's entrepreneurship program at the Farmer School of Business. “It’s not only theoretical or from a textbook. Our undergraduates leave with the mindset and tools they need to make their mark on the world.”

At Miami, entrepreneurship is taught through immersion in real world experiences such as client projects, internships, student-run businesses and the Red Hawk Hatchery, where students launch their own businesses.

Entrepreneurship also extends beyond start-up businesses to social entrepreneurship, which seeks to apply business principles – innovation, creative thinking, risk-taking, tenacity – to persistent social problems.

The Center for Social Entrepreneurship was founded at Miami's Farmer School of Business in 2006 and has won numerous international awards. An example of one of the program’s innovations is Edun Live on Campus, a wholly student-run initiative launched at Miami in 2007 in partnership with Bono’s apparel company that has been scaled to more than a dozen other colleges and universities nationwide.

“What makes our entrepreneurship program different is that we bring together students with different majors from across the university,” said Roger Jenkins, dean of the Farmer School of Business. “That interdisciplinary approach prompts innovative thinking and prepares our graduates to be leaders in their workplaces and in their communities.”

The entrepreneurship rankings are based on key criteria in the areas of teaching entrepreneurship business fundamentals in the classroom, staffing departments with successful entrepreneurs, excellence in mentorship, providing experiential or entrepreneurial opportunities outside of the classroom, as well as non-traditional, distinguishable aspects of their programs. The results of the survey, along with the analysis, appear in the October issue of Entrepreneur, which hit newsstands Sept. 20 posted at www.princetonreview.com/entrepreneur.