With the announcement last week that Miami University's Thomas C. Page for Entrepreneurship has been ranked as the 19th best program of its kind by Entrepreneur magazine, the center is already working on plans to diversify the program.
"Our goal is to have 50 percent of the students enrolled in the program to be non-business majors within the next 18 months," said Joseph Kayne, director of the Page Center. "We're at about 30 percent right now."
This announcement came on the heels of the April issue of BusinessWeek, which ranked the Richard T. Farmer School of Business 17th among undergraduate business schools in the United States.
With this recent ranking, Miami is now one of two undergraduate institutions in the country to have a business school ranked in the top 20 by BusinessWeek and an entrepreneurship program ranked in the top 20 by Entrepreneur. Brigham Young University, located in Provo, Utah, is the other institution.
The Page Center was endowed in 1994 and has experienced rapid growth since its inception. It has evolved from the offering of a single entrepreneurship class in its infant stages to its current state, in which a minor and a thematic sequence are also offered.
One of the reasons for the success of the Page Center; said Susan Thomas, director of integrated programs and arts management for the School of Fine Arts; is the potential for application of entrepreneurial principles in a number of areas outside of the traditional business world.
"I see it as a very practical opportunity for arts management students who are always looking for new and creative ways to reach an audience," Thomas said. "The entrepreneurship program really seems to help."
Kayne said that some of the more recent developments that have helped the program to branch outside of the business school have included the revamping of the entrepreneurship curriculum so that it can be cross listed with other courses in other disciplines, such as in the School of Fine Arts or the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, which has taken advantage of a social entrepreneurship class offered this semester.
"What we focus on is behavior," Kayne said. "We emphasize things like risk assessment, team building and resource management, all of which are very important to being successful in the world."
The challenge for the program and for schools such as the fine arts school, which utilize the offerings of the entrepreneurship program, Thomas said, lies in getting the message of the strengths of an education rounded by an entrepreneurial-intense aspect. She said that incoming students will be influenced in large part by the characteristics of their inner drives when it comes to an interest in entrepreneurship, and some will be wary of the mindset she feels is necessary for entrepreneurial success.
"Some students will already have that risk-taking initiative that is needed in entrepreneurship when they come in," Thomas said, "but some will want to go the traditional business route."
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Cyleigh Brez, a senior interdisciplinary business management major with a minor in entrepreneurship, said the Page Center has provided a particularly unique side to her business education in that many of the professors have actually had practice in the business world.
"The program has really been growing, considering it doesn't have a large full-time faculty base," Brez said. "Professors have really helped me to network, and have taught me to bring the entrepreneurial spirit both to a small business setting and to a larger corporation."
Kayne said that the program sees the possibility of an entrepreneurship major at some unknown point in the future, even though students can already pursue a concentration in entrepreneurship through the interdisciplinary business program.
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