The Princeton Review has named the entrepreneurship program at DePaul University’s Kellstadt Graduate School of Business among the best in the nation, placing the school at No. 20 on its list of “Top 25 Graduate Schools for Entrepreneurship Programs for 2015.”
The rankings come from solicited survey data about entrepreneurship program offerings from more than 2,000 undergraduate and graduate business schools from April through June 2014. The survey, which included more than 60 questions, asked schools about their commitment to entrepreneurship inside and outside the classroom; the percentage of their faculty, students, and alumni actively and successfully involved in entrepreneurial endeavors; the number of their mentorship programs; and their funding for scholarships and grants for entrepreneurial studies and projects.
DePaul’s entrepreneurship program began in 1982 and currently offers 25 entrepreneurship-related graduate courses. And there has been plenty of start-up success stories— over the last five years, graduates have started 102 companies and have collectively raised $2.5 million in funding. Students and alumni also can receive practical guidance on how to start and grow new ventures from the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center.
“We’re a hands-on university,” says program founder and director Harold Welsch (BUS ’66, MBA ’68), the Coleman Foundation Chair in Entrepreneurship. “We teach our students to be constantly aware of new opportunities by applying their creativity and innovativeness to adapt to new markets.”
“We recommend DePaul University and all of the other institutions on our list this year not only for their superb faculties and wide range of courses in entrepreneurship, but also for their out-of-class offerings,” Robert Franek, Princeton Review Senior VP / Publisher, said. “Their students have extraordinary opportunities to network with established entrepreneurs, interact on teams that turn promising ideas into possible start-ups, and develop skills to launch their own successful businesses.”