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When Florida Gulf Coast University quietly opened up its entrepreneurship classes a year ago to the whole campus, Sandra Kauanui wasn't sure how well it would go over with students outside the business school.
For one thing, the move wasn't heavily publicized. “It wasn't in the catalog,” says Kauanui, the chair of management at FGCU's Lutgert College of Business and director of the Institute for Entrepreneurship.
Until last year, entrepreneurship classes were restricted to management students inside the Lutgert College of Business. Approximately 200 students have been enrolled in these classes in recent years.
But despite its absence from the campus class catalog, enrollment surged to 800 students when the university opened entrepreneurship classes to the whole student body just more than a year ago. There are about 14,600 students at FGCU in Fort Myers.
In response, Kauanui says she's been recruiting more professors and lobbying for more financial resources to beef up the entrepreneurship staff. “I just keep adding more classes,” she laughs.
Kauanui says students today want meaningful and purposeful work when they graduate and don't necessarily see themselves working for someone else. “They have to create their own jobs,” she says.
Interest in entrepreneurship is broad. Students are coming from a variety of other departments, even unexpected areas such as the College of Education, Kauanui says.
Improvements in technology are encouraging students to explore striking out on their own and there's a great demand for that knowledge. “Technology makes it a lot cheaper to put out a product and test it,” Kauanui says.
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