The State-Sponsored Student Entrepreneur

Abstract

In Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State and Higher Education (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), academic capitalism was theorized and empirically detailed as a new knowledge/learning regime. However, slaughter and Rhoades examined students' roles primarily as educational consumers rather than as students engaging the (in)formal curricula and as academic entrepreneurs. In this paper, we extend and modify the academic capitalist framework by theorizing and empirically developing the instructional dimension of the academic capitalism knowledge/learning regime, examining the new roles institutions are supporting for students educationally as entrepreneurs. We suggest that student entrepreneurship, is an emerging phenomenon characterized, like faculty entrepreneurship, by opportunities for market activity, particularly in science and technology fields that are close to the knowledge economy. These opportunities are embedded in expanding institutional infrastructure for commercialization and are further sponsored by external actors such as foundations and donors. Although thus far a relatively small number of undergraduate students have access to these opportunities, our cases suggest that some of those students who do successfully gain access to an array of benefits, thus leading us to refine and recast our reading of the effects of academic capitalism on students. Although there are voluminous literatures on learning (most fully developed in the K-12 area) and student development (one of the most empirically developed literatures on higher education), we are not concerned with the psychology and content of learning or with cognitive or psycho-social outcomes. Rather, we are focused on the social structure of students' roles, on the way students' roles as learners of entrepreneurship and as entrepreneurs are shaped by professors and student peers within and beyond the classroom as well as by an array of organizations and social structures inside and outside of universities. These socializing processes and structures are part of the academic capitalist regime, which has facilitated the emergence of a new student role, that of state-sponsored entrepreneur. Therein lies part of our extension and modification of Slaughter and Rhoades' theory of academic capitalism: students are not simply commodified victims of academic capitalism; they can also be institutional - and thus state-sponsored beneficiaries given direct instruction and infrastructural support as entrepreneurs. Of course, virtually all students are subsidized in that they do not pay the full cost of their education. However, in the case of entrepreneurship, part of what makes state sponsorship different is the provision of curriculum geared not only to preparing entrepreneurs (which arguably has long been the case) but also to encouraging and enabling them to engage in capitalist activity as students using university infrastructure specifically designed for that purpose. Slaughter and Rhoades point out that in the case of faculty this is a substantial break with the past, when such activity would have been quite literally illegal. But when Slaughter and Rhoades detail students' entrepreneurial involvement in online class notes businesses, they indicate how universities sought to prevent students from engaging in that activity and how many of the enterprises failed. By contrast, we point to how universities are promoting, supporting, and underwriting such student entrepreneurship in entrepreneurship education programs with some success. In 2001, the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership staff quantified the growth of entrepreneurship as an academic field of study across the U. S. higher education system: an endowed chair averaging $2.16 million was established every 13 days, program enrollment totals ran as high as 1,500 students per semester per institution, and case competitions offered students prizes as high as $10,000 and exposure to potential investors (Safranski, 2004). …