Sramana Mitra Speaking At TEDxHarkerSchool In San Jose On October 22

TEDxHarkerSchool is an event for high school and college students arranged to help foster youth entrepreneurship through inspiration and learning from successful entrepreneurs. Sramana Mitra’s talk is entitled, “The World Is Your Oyster.” Other speakers include Guy Kawasaki, Kevin Surace, Karl Mehta, and Rahim Fazal. You can find more details and register today here.

Featured Videos

The Cost Of Higher Education: A Proposed Solution

The cost of higher education has become a hot topic, especially in light of the outrageous levels of youth unemployment in America and Europe. The average price of tuition at American four-year colleges, in constant 2007 dollars, climbed from $8,552 in 1980 to $20,154 in 2009. Outstanding student loan stands at over a trillion dollars at the moment, and thought leaders like Peter Thiel have taken aggressive positions against education bought at these prices.

I happen to be a believer in higher education, but the cost issue is a real one, and it needs a solution. This post is a reflection on the subject.

>>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: Monarch Media, Santa Cruz, California

Online education and training continue to grow in popularity. It costs less for students to get bachelor’s and master’s degrees online. Employers, too, save money by arranging for employees to take training courses online and on their own time.

Monarch Media has provided e-learning solutions, including online and mobile courses, educational software development, learning management systems, and instructional design for more than 13 years. The Santa Cruz–based company serves a client base across both the private and public sectors. The top target segments are educational publishers, universities, government agencies, nonprofits and corporate training departments, and the company follows a traditional business-to-business approach. Within the educational publishing market, Monarch Media focuses on serving large and mid-sized companies ranging from the largest in the industry, such as Cengage Learning, Elsevier and the National Institutes of Health to specialty publishers like ETR Associates, a provider of specialized public health training materials. Monarch Media also plans to launch new product lines of skills training courses for mobile delivery.

>>>

1M/1M: Video Message Based On Recent Talks

I have been giving a lot of talks lately, and interacting with hundreds of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship development leaders around the world. Here is an YouTube video synthesizing some of the core points of these discussions on bootstrapping, positioning, and lean startups:

1M/1M: Online Education Module Of The Curriculum Is Ready

Readers, we have just released the online education module of the 1M/1M premium curriculum. In it, you will find a synthesis of the various trends and opportunities that I see at this point, along with case studies and video lectures. The opportunity is clearly huge in multiple dimensions, and I am convinced that many businesses can and will be built in this segment over this decade.

1Mby1M Deal Radar: Camp Bow Wow, Boulder

What do the Champagne houses Veuve Clicquot, Pommery, and Bollinger; the printer of the Declaration of Independence; and the German steel conglomerate ThyssenKrupp AG have in common? At one time, all were run by widows who took over the business after their husband died. It’s a path that many women have followed across the centuries, back through the Industrial Revolution, medieval Europe, the Roman and Sumerian empires, and perhaps even further. Today’s Deal Radar is the story of one woman entrepreneur, Heidi Ganahl, who found herself in a somewhat different situation: Her husband was killed in a small plane crash just as they were getting started on a business together. Ganahl went on to carry out their idea and found Camp Bow Wow, a dog boarding service, and Home Buddies, its in-home pet care component. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: Latitude Learning, Saline, Michigan

Latitude Learning is an open source, performance-driven software as a service (SaaS) learning management system (LMS) designed to assist training firms, middle-market companies, Fortune 1000 enterprises, and non-profit organizations.  >>>

Entrepreneurship Education: Youth Entrepreneurship Course

As a follow-up to my previous post, The Time Has Come For The College Entrepreneur, a question that begs to be answered is: What is the composition of a youth entrepreneurship course? What are the assumptions that need to be made about what students know?

Of course, one of the assumptions needs to be that the student has no business background or business training. Typically, they come from other streams of study and need to take entrepreneurship as a supplemental course.

In addition, give the job prospects, we have to also keep in mind the cost of education. It’s not reasonable to expect a large number of our unemployed youth to go to expensive business school programs and be saddled with large debt burdens. Entrepreneurship education needs to be imparted quickly, efficiently, and at a minimum cost. Ideally, it’s on a live project – a company – a venture – that the student has already started tinkering with.

I have tried to keep these criteria in mind as I have designed the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) program.

I am also curious to hear from educators at high schools and colleges who are coaching and mentoring students facing this deep recession on what, if anything, you are doing to steer them toward entrepreneurship.

The Time Has Come For The College Entrepreneur

America’s youth unemployment is at an all-time high these days. Studies and reports are showing numbers that are scary, depressing, and downright desperate. A Huffington Post article last summer pegged the number of 16–24 year olds who are unemployed at 51.1%. Things have improved a bit since, but the scale of the problem is still staggering.

We need the high schools and colleges in particular to step up and teach practical aspects of an entrepreneurial way of life to their students, and set expectations that kids and young adults will need to take destiny in their own hands. >>>

Havoc In The For-Profit University Sector

For-profit educational institutions are under tighter scrutiny with Senate and House committees examining their admission process, which seems to mislead applicants, targets veterans and registers student default rates at least double those of traditional universities. According to a Congressional report released earlier this month, for-profit colleges have high dropout rates, poor results, and high loan default rates. At four of the five for-profit colleges studied by the report, 24% of students defaulted on their loans, compared with the national rate of 7% of students defaulting on government loans in 2008. Another equally disturbing report was released by the Education Trust, which cites statistics detailing poor education scores of for-profit institutions. According to the report, a mere 22% of students earn their degrees in six years in a for-profit college compared with 55% of students in public and 65% in private nonprofit colleges and universities. Apollo Group’s University of Phoenix fared the worst with a mere 9% six-year graduation rate. >>>