Written by Eleanor Browne, Enterprise & Innovation Education Coordinator in the Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation. Please get in touch with Eleanor for any queries on this topic.
Ask anyone to name an entrepreneur and the stereotypical Branson, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Gates examples are very likely to spring to mind, and a quick Google search agrees. With many high-profile entrepreneurs advocating to follow their example and avoid a university degree if you want to be truly entrepreneurial (read more), the question of how well entrepreneurship and higher education fit together has been widely debated.
Pair this with the seemingly endless scandals where private profit is prioritised ahead of business ethics in cases like Facebook and Uber and we are faced with a situation where students and academics may understandably want to distance themselves from this behaviour. But in focusing only on these stereotypes we would be throwing the metaphorical baby out with the bathwater.
