Entrepreneurship Education in Higher Education: A Review of the US Context

Abstract

This chapter considers the contemporary experience of entrepreneurship education in the United States (US), within Higher Education. Over the last forty years entrepreneurship has grown explosively across the higher education landscape, from just a few universities with the occasional class in the late 1970s, to entire schools and colleges of entrepreneurship today (Morris, Kuratko and Cornwall, 2013a). The US has arguably one of the most developed approaches to entrepreneurship education in its university system worldwide and this has been achieved without extensive educational policy intervention by individual States, or by the Federal government (Kuratko, 2005). This chapter focuses on the development of entrepreneurship education over time in the US. It explores how the subject grew, how it changed, and how it became embedded across the higher education system. As well as exploring this history the chapter considers contemporary entrepreneurship education in the US. In this part of the chapter the focus is on components that seem unique to the US context. The chapter concludes by considering where entrepreneurship education is headed next, what developments might be expected, and how entrepreneurship education research can contribute to this development.