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Kauffman Foundation offers schools the opportunity to participate in $35 million second round of Kauffman Campuses Initiative
KANSAS CITY, MO, June 27, 2006 - In its continuing efforts to see entrepreneurship education become a common and accessible campus-wide opportunity, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation today announced its second Kauffman Campuses Initiative with a $35 million commitment to colleges and universities throughout the country.
The Kauffman Campuses Initiative was launched in 2003, when eight schools were awarded a total of $25 million to transform the campus culture by providing entrepreneurship courses and programs within liberal arts, engineering and other disciplines outside of the business school.
"Our initiative is creating a cultural change and making the entire university system more entrepreneurial," said Kauffman Foundation president and CEO Carl Schramm. "We want all students, not just those in business schools, to see the value of thinking like entrepreneurs. We want them to be able to recognize and seize opportunity when it presents itself, no matter in what field they find themselves."
Building on the success of the first round of the initiative, the second phase of Kauffman Campuses combines the Kauffman Foundation's funds with matched dollars from other funding partners - providing even greater resources to participating schools for the implementation and sustainability of entrepreneurship education programs across their campuses. For example, The Burton D. Morgan Foundation in Akron, Ohio, is matching funds with the Kauffman Foundation to provide the opportunity for liberal arts colleges in Northeast Ohio to participate in the program.
With the Kauffman Foundation's investment of $35 million, combined with matching commitments from other funding partners and participating schools, more than $200 million will be directed to cross-campus entrepreneurship programs over the next five years.
"Entrepreneurship has been, and continues to be, so critical to our country, yet only recently has it been addressed in higher education - and then mostly in the business school," said Judith Cone, the Kauffman Foundation's vice president of entrepreneurship. "Through the Kauffman Campuses Initiative, hundreds of thousands of students will learn that entrepreneurship can be applied to any discipline by combining their passion and resources to seize an opportunity and create a sustainable entity. A fine arts student can learn how to open an art gallery, or a pre-med student can learn how to identify an emerging opportunity and then champion that idea so that it can lead to a new innovation in medicine."
Indeed, the demand for entrepreneurship education has grown exponentially in the past few decades. More than 300 four-year institutions offer courses in entrepreneurship designed for students not enrolled in the business school, while the number of entrepreneurship departments has increased from seven in 1999 to 18 in 2006. In 2006, nearly 2,100 colleges and universities offer at least one course in entrepreneurship - up from 300 in 1985.
The prospective Kauffman Campuses schools were selected based on a series of criteria, including the ability to create a culture of entrepreneurship that permeates the campus, the potential to create new representative models, and the ability to partner with other foundations and funders.
Each school will be given a planning grant to develop its proposal, which will be presented to an independent panel of judges in December. Each participating school is eligible to receive a grant if the judges determine its proposal is innovative and sustainable. The grant amount will be based on each school's commitment to entrepreneurship education across all academic fields, its unique needs, and the scope of its proposal.
The following schools have been invited to submit proposals for this multi-million dollar grant program:
- Arizona State University
- Purdue University
- Brown University
- Syracuse University
- Carnegie Mellon University
- University of North Carolina System
- Georgetown University
- University of Wisconsin-Madison
- New York University
- University of Maryland-Baltimore County
- Northeast Ohio Schools:
- Baldwin-Wallace College
- College of Wooster
- John Carroll University
- Dennison University
- Hiram College
- Kenyon College
- Lake Erie College
- Oberlin College
- Walsh University
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About the Kauffman Foundation
The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City is a private, nonpartisan foundation that works with partners to advance entrepreneurship in America and improve the education of children and youth. The Kauffman Foundation was established in the mid-1960s by the late entrepreneur and philanthropist Ewing Marion Kauffman. Information about the Kauffman Foundation is available at www.kauffman.org.
