Entrepreneurship and the General Education Curriculum: Ready or Not?

Abstract

While entrepreneurship is now widely recognized as an essential component to undergraduate business education, it is not often available to students across multiple disciplines. Recognizing the benefits of entrepreneurship, we argue that the course is a natural fit for inclusion in university General Education curricula The purpose of this article is threefold. The first is to review why entrepreneurship programs and coursework can have difficulty gaining acceptance into existing university General Education structures. The second is to explain the process and outline how inclusion of an entrepreneurship course in the General Education curriculum can be facilitated. The third purpose utilizes the sociological theory of structuration (Giddens, 1984) to develop a process model to help business faculty deal with potential sources of resistance. We hope to provide educators with a means for developing strategies for successfully positioning entrepreneurship courses into General Education programs. We conclude...