Can entrepreneurship actually be taught? That's the question behind this ranking, and it's harder to answer than it sounds. Most people who've sat through a business course know the gap between understanding a balance sheet and deciding to bet your savings on an idea. Teaching the first is manageable. Teaching the second is a different problem entirely.
Plenty of colleges now run entrepreneurship programs that pair classroom theory with hands-on work. Students learn how a business runs, build projects under faculty guidance, and meet peers, investors, and sometimes the person who ends up as a cofounder. The open question is which programs produce the strongest outcomes, meaning the people who go on to build companies. Those aren't the same thing. A program can be busy, well-funded, and full of events without producing anyone who ships a product or raises money.
The Teaching Problem
Entrepreneur has worked with The Princeton Review for the past 20 years to answer that. The two organizations look for standout undergraduate and graduate programs, but they don't stop at the curriculum. The real test is what happens after graduation: whether alumni start businesses, build useful networks, and raise money. That's a sensible instinct. A syllabus is a promise, but a company is evidence.
Here's the honest caveat: a classroom can't manufacture the drive to found something. That impulse is personal, and it shows up differently in everyone. Some students arrive already restless, looking for a reason to stop waiting. Others discover the itch only after a professor hands them a half-formed idea and a deadline. Still, the data points in one direction. Strong schools tend to produce strong founders, and a student with the right mindset can use a good program to get a head start. (And this is the part most people overlook: the program doesn't have to create the founder. It mostly has to avoid getting in the way.)
I'd treat that correlation carefully, though. Ambitious students tend to seek out ambitious programs, so it's hard to tell whether the school is producing founders or simply attracting people who were going to build something anyway. Good rankings can't fully untangle that, and the honest ones will say so.
How We Made the List
Last summer, The Princeton Review surveyed more than 250 colleges and universities on how well they serve future entrepreneurs. The full methodology and the details behind each ranking are available at princetonreview.com/entrepreneur. The key metrics fall into three buckets, and they're worth reading closely because each one measures something different.
Survey-based rankings carry a built-in limitation: schools fill in the forms themselves. That doesn't make the results worthless, but it means the numbers reflect what institutions choose to report and how they define their terms. A school that counts every weekend hackathon isn't comparable to one that counts only formal competitions, and readers should keep that in mind before drawing conclusions from small gaps.
- Academics and requirements. Schools reported whether they offer an entrepreneurship major, minor, concentration, or degree. They also counted how many entrepreneurship courses they teach across areas such as new technology, social entrepreneurship, business analytics, idea development, and venture capital. The survey also asked whether students from other disciplines can work together, such as a computer engineering student building a product alongside a business student. That last question matters more than it looks, since mixed teams are where a lot of real projects start.
- Outside the classroom. This category is about money and access. Schools reported the number and value of scholarships and how many outside mentors worked with students. Surveyors also counted annual business-plan and new-venture competitions, hackathons, and pitch-deck or startup weekends, along with prize money. Schools also reported the total dollars their students had won in outside competitions. Scholarships and mentors tend to matter more to early-stage founders than prize money does, and the survey captures both.
- Students and faculty. Schools reported full- and part-time enrollment in entrepreneurship courses for the 2024–2025 academic year, and how many of those students had written an actionable business plan for a startup. For outcomes, they reported how many companies graduates had started over the past five and 10 years, and how much those companies had raised from investors. The survey also counted faculty teaching entrepreneurship courses and how many had started, bought, or run a business themselves.
What the Metrics Actually Measure
Here's what I'd watch in these numbers. Course counts and competitions are easy to inflate, while alumni funding and company formation are harder to fake. The third bucket, which tracks what graduates actually built, is where the ranking's credibility will come from. Everything else is context.
Academic counts are the most visible metric and probably the least informative on their own. A school can add a minor with a handful of electives and technically qualify. What matters more is whether students from different departments end up building something together, and that's the part a survey can barely capture.
Money and access deserve a closer look. Early-stage founders usually run short on capital, credibility, and people willing to take their calls. A large prize can attract talent for a semester, but a steady pipeline of mentors who stay involved often does more for a startup over time. The mix of cash and access will look different at every school, and that variation is itself informative.
Student and faculty data is the most revealing in theory. Enrollment shows demand, business plans show whether students finished the work, and faculty with real operating experience suggest the teaching is grounded in practice. A professor who has run a payroll through a cash crunch or dealt with a cofounder who stopped showing up brings lessons no textbook covers. Not a small thing.
What This Means for You
If you're a prospective student weighing entrepreneurship programs, don't stop at the ranking. Ask how many recent graduates started companies, what those companies raised, and who teaches the courses. Those answers will tell you more than any headline will.
That said, a ranking can only show you where the signal is. It can't tell you whether you'll be the person who walks away from a stable job to build something. That decision stays with you, and it's the part no program can fully solve. If you're already working in this space, the more useful question is which schools feed the networks you'd want to join.
Implications and Outlook
The bigger story is whether universities treat entrepreneurship as a credential or as a practice. Adding a major to a catalog is easy. Sustained founder output requires mentors, funding pipelines, and faculty who've been in the trenches, and those take years to build. Rankings like this push schools to measure what they're doing, which is useful, even if the first versions are imperfect.
Expect the next editions to face the same test. The list will only earn trust if its outcome data holds up over time, and if schools that look strong on paper keep producing founders once the survey cycle moves on. Until then, treat it as a starting point for better questions, not a final verdict.
