One of my biggest regrets in college so far has been to take entrepreneurship as my business concentration. I intend to be an entrepreneur, but I have realized the pointlessness of the concentration, and that it would have benefited me far more to take a different concentration. Here are a few of the reasons why entrepreneurship class is incredibly pointless.

The curriculum for an entrepreneurship class is typically impractical. They don’t teach you core skills you will need to know, such as finding a manufacturer, using design applications, and finding employees. Instead, the curriculum is made up of examining hypothetical situations and going through the motions of entrepreneurship (without doing it).

My entrepreneurship class spent the first month talking about what an entrepreneur is. If I can emphasize how useless that is, I’ll restate that: my class spent weeks defining what qualities an entrepreneur has. To give you the TLDR of that unit: there are no hard set qualities, whether it’s nature or nurture there’s all kinds of people who are entrepreneurs. This is obvious information.

My class then did a lot of case studies, examining entrepreneurs and the businesses they created. Examining the qualities that other entrepreneurs have does not give me their qualities. It’s like showing me another person’s tool box without adding any tools to my own. Completely useless. Also, I could hardly imagine any of those entrepreneurs attributing their own success to taking entrepreneurship classes where they read about other entrepreneurs. It takes practical skills to get to a point of success, and these case studies have been the ultimate time buffer.

A large portion of the class is to “form” a startup in an assigned group. There were many things wrong with this. For one, though the ideas might be good, only one person’s idea in the group will be chosen. Since only one person is actually dedicated to this idea, the rest of the group may lag behind. Also, by not recognizing everyone’s idea, many people don’t get any shot to create their own business. When we’re all being trained to be entrepreneurs, it’s important for everyone to get a taste of developing their own idea, not supporting someone else’s.

Also, there’s no expectations to actually follow through with the idea for the group project. Thus, no money is put in. Since no money is put in, there’s no manufacturers being talked to, partners reached out to, or so much more that goes into a business. By solely collecting surveys and creating fake social media pages for a good grade, nothing is actually accomplished.

Though it may be easy to get an A in the course, the A doesn’t reflect what was actually learned that could transfer to real life. While entrepreneurship class is a good effort by the school to create entrepreneurs, it doesn’t actually achieve that goal. You don’t learn to be an entrepreneur at school - you learn to be an entrepreneur by actually doing it in the real world.