A growing number of students at Iowa universities are showing an interest in entrepreneurship, a story in the Business Record reports. Photo from APIStudyAbroad on Flickr. 

I love that our friends in the larger publications in Des Moines are writing more and more about the startup community in the area (did you see Juice just highlighted “The Startup Scene” as part of their “Hot in Des Moines” issue?), and I was especially excited to see that the Business Record ran a story on entrepreneurial education in Iowa’s largest universities, “Students see benefits to entrepreneurial studies.”

Writer Kyle Oppenhuizen interviewed b-school faculty at the big four (Iowa State, Iowa, UNI and Drake) universities, who all noted an uptick interest in entrepreneurial education, primarily at the undergraduate level. “Universities” and their impact on the startup community are one of the “six tenets” (see our post Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem), and Oppenhuizen reported on several statistics on the growth of demand for this type of education. Please read the full article, but two quotes that I found encouraging:

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“Students are entrepreneurial. They’re creative,” said Michael Crum, dean of the College of Business at Iowa State University. “They’re looking out there for more than just landing the job with the big, established, well-known company. They’re looking at starting their own enterprise. And that’s encouraging. It’s hard to keep up with the demand for those courses.”

“I think some students – and I think it’s a function of the generation – want to be their own boss more than when I was in school in the 1980s,” said Lon Moeller, associate dean for undergraduate programs in the Henry B. Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa.

This idea of young people “wanting to be their own boss” and looking to do something other than working for someone else at a “big, established, well-known company” is exactly what we’re seeing, too, and that is paying dividends in the form of innovation all across this state and the region. We’ve written many times about companies launched by recent students like Hatchlings, Chegg, and Gamerosters.com. I’m excited to see what comes from the crop of students building today and into the future.

For the full story, visit BusinessRecord.com.