Thursday, February 24, 2011

Entrepreneurship at College Grinnell Needs a Dilbert

I wanted to look at something else besides cupcakes, coffee, and condoms from yesterday's post. Bob's the coffee shop at Grinnell is student managed and as long as I can recall has had financial difficulty. From the article it sounds like things haven't changed much. “Bob’s is 12,000 bucks in debt and basically every semester Grinnell talks about shutting us down, but they basically forgive the debt,”

Contrast this with Dilbert creator, Scott Adams's college experience, described here . It sounds like he turned businesses at his school to profitability. But it is worth noting before he started there was no system of accounting at his school's business.

Perhaps students should start with smaller businesses. Like selling pizza cupcakes. I'm not sure as Adam's suggests every B student would benefit from learning about entrepreneurship, but there is something about the experience that I think students learn a lot from that they can use in their own future employment.

It is also worth thinking about the potential positive externalities to the college like Grinnell from having a coffee shop. I know Bob's was one of the things that attracted me to Grinnell.
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1 comment:

Jennie said...

Other externalities-- the amount of alumni donations that would be lost if the college shut down Bob's.