What is a Liberal Arts College of Entrepreneurship?
Families today are facing the college decision with far more scrutiny — and confusion — than ever before.
Where to begin? Campuses are filled with protests, organized just as often by non-students as by undergraduates. Employers find most college graduates to be utterly incapable of contributing to their companies. The new FAFSA rollout was a disaster. Inflated tuition costs combined with the “discount game” has made the price of college a mystery.
Universities are attempting to respond to these problems by marketing their programs as streamlined paths to careers. And by “streamlined,” they mean faster and more technically focused — which is often code for stripped of the liberal arts.
But talk to any CEO, and they’ll tell you this doesn’t work. We talk to them all the time. They say, “I don’t care what major an applicant chose. I’m just going to need to retrain them anyway.” Or even, “I prefer applicants who haven’t focused only on marketing [or computer science, or journalism, or psychology, or communication].”
As one executive recently told me, “Companies need people who can think. Who can communicate solutions and build consensus. Who can listen to the legal team, the sales team, the product team, the finance team, and understand the whole picture.”
Executives are also often quoted exhorting students to return to the liberal arts — not the kind that turns young people into unhappy and incapable replicas of their disaffected professors, but the kind that matures them as humans and cultivates their faculties of logical and clear thinking, perseverance and conviction, and even love.
Everyone sees the Catch-22. Do I sell my soul at an industrialized university, or do I commit a huge investment in a modern liberal arts college that prepares me to be an intellectual barista or golf instructor? Most families opt for the least worst option, prioritizing cost, safety, and a sense of “college experience” above education.
Enter: the liberal arts college of entrepreneurship. Hildegard College is the first of its kind, but it won’t be the last.
Uri Levine, founder of Waze, famously exhorted aspiring entrepreneurs to “fall in love with the problem, not the solution.”
At Hildegard, students seek to fall in love with the problem. This begins not with an economic or practical problem for which there might be a business solution, but with a human problem. Hildegard students read the greatest thinkers who have ever written about the fundamental problems that humans collectively face.
This is the basis of the Foundations of Thought curriculum. Students discuss Great Texts in classes centered on foundational questions. This intellectual and moral foundation is so important to us, we actually name the classes as questions:
Who is God?
What is the Good?
What makes a society Just?
What is Nature, and how do we know it?
What does it mean to be free?
What is the Human Condition?
And in Entrepreneurship courses, students ask the same questions. They study product design, organizational strategy, nonprofit mission, and financial planning, but they do so not by seeking solutions-in-a-vacuum, but rather, out of an enduring curiosity about the problem.
Entrepreneurship is a philosophy of learning. We prepare students to do great things by teaching them how to build great things. It isn’t one-size-fits-all. Our undergraduates are working on projects in bioenergy, music, education, retail food, business strategy, and Bitcoin.
Last Spring, Hildegard students and faculty traveled to El Zonte, El Salvador for an immersive experience of third-world development and economic growth. We visited community development organizations, nonprofits focused on affordable housing, and innovative organizations in microfinance and economics.
Our goal was not to solve but to listen. How can people buy houses when they don’t have access to a bank? How do families start businesses when so many of the community’s men are forced to work abroad? Each problem required students to practice both the liberal arts and entrepreneurship, because each problem was a human problem. It’s important to understand the technology, economics, and social science behind such questions, but to fall in love with the problem means grasping it at its deepest levels.
A B.A. in Liberal Arts and Entrepreneurship appears like a contradiction to some. But to others, especially to the brightest and most hungry young adults, it’s a breath of fresh air.
Want to find out more? Schedule a visit to our Costa Mesa campus.
Are you moved to support our mission? Contact President Smith at advancement@hildegard.college.
