A recent Gallup poll shows that students have the ambition to be entrepreneurs but many lack the tools and skills to actually do it. The poll consisted of a sample of 1,721 students polled from May 17 to June 4 and released in partnership with Operation HOPE.
A whopping 77% in grades 5-12 say they want to be their own boss and 45% say they will start their own business.
We also know that to be an entrepreneur you have to be willing to take risks and willing to push through failure. According to the poll students don’t see a problem with either and are actually big risk takers.
However all of this ambition needs some guidance and that’s where the problems start. According to the poll only 56% of high school students said their school teaches them about money and banking. Then only 64% of those high school students said their school offers classes on how to start a business. At the same time only 23% of high school students said they work at a paying job for more than 1 hour per week.
So while the ambition is there and the risk taking mindset is there many students still end up never going after their ideas. How can they if they are not exposed at an early age to the idea of starting a business and what it takes to do it? While schools, especially grade schools, do not have to develop in depth programs for starting a business they should still support and expose students to the possibilities.
How can schools do this and what type of classes or programs should they be offering?
As the co-founder of AOL, Steve Case said this past week, “Entrepreneurship is America’s secret sauce”. So we better find a way to support it as early as possible in the future generations.
