College students bootstrap for summer

Filed in archive Entrepreneurship on June 12, 2006

Check out this article in the Southeast Missourian about mid-western college students turning to entrepreneurship as a way of getting summer work. Notice that in both cases these business models follow the bootstrapping credo, depending on a simple service approach and by definition are focused on regular income over long term growth.

A few years ago USA Today claimed more college students were launching their own businesses due to high unemployment among twenty somethings in the early part of the decade. For whatever reason, some indicators suggest entrepreneurship among college students may be on the upswing.

In 2004, Gerry Hills, director of the Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that membership in the Collegiate Entrepreneurs' Organization, which grew out of a regional group Hills had helped organize in the early 80's, now boasted 120 chapters and 14,000 members nationwide.