For the fourth consecutive year, Success magazine has named the University of Colorado at Boulder one of the nation's top 25 schools for entrepreneurship education.
Other colleges making the list, published in the magazines September issue, included the University of California-Berkeley, Harvard, Northwestern, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School of Business.
A national panel of entrepreneurship educators selected the best programs from among 137 graduate business schools across the country. CU is among 15 colleges that have been ranked in the Top 25 since Success began its ranking in 1994.
"Entrepreneurship is a pillar of the curriculum at the college of business at CU-Boulder, and it has really paid off for us said Dale Meyer, a professor at CUs College of Business and Administration. We are a real-world program and clearly the best in Colorado and the Rocky Mountain West. We have tailored our activities to our students and we are again proud to be recognized as one of the very best programs in the country," he said.
A distinguishing feature of CU-Boulder's program is its focus on technology.
The Center for Entrepreneurship is a collaborative effort between the colleges of business and engineering. The Centers 40-member advisory board is made up of prominent entrepreneurs including Peter Behrendt of Exabyte, Steve Bosley of the Bank of Boulder, Frank Day of Rock Bottom Restaurants and Paul Jerde of Requisite Technology.
More than 400 graduate and undergraduate students take advantage of entrepreneurship courses each year. "Our program is not only academically rigorous, it is a living laboratory for entrepreneurship," Meyer said. "Our students apply their classroom learning and prior experience while doing projects, internships and working with top management teams in entrepreneurial companies."
More than 20 companies have been launched by CU-Boulder graduates in recent years, several of which grew out of a business plan class taught by Juan Rodriguez, professor of electrical and computer engineering and a co-founder of both Exabyte and Storage Technology corporations.
Schools were judged by Success on five criteria: depth and breadth of the curriculum; faculty qualifications and the support they provide to students' entrepreneurial endeavors; overall quality, longevity, resources and community outreach of the program; caliber of students; and resources and programs providing students with "hands on" entrepreneurial experience.
To be eligible for consideration, a school had to offer at least three distinct courses in entrepreneurship in its master's of business administration program.
CUs program was recently ranked No. 1 in doctoral entrepreneurship education at the 42nd World Conference of the International Council of Small Businesses in San Francisco.
For information about the Center for Entrepreneurship please call Denis Nock, director, at (303) 492-5576.