DePaul’s highly ranked entrepreneurship programs provide students access to pitch competitions with prizes that help them grow their businesses.
DePaul University moved up in two recently released rankings of the best higher education programs for studying entrepreneurship.
The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine’s “Top Schools for Entrepreneurship 2023” placed DePaul’s graduate entrepreneurship program No. 14 (up from No. 18) nationally and No. 3 (up from No. 6) in the Midwest. At the undergraduate level, DePaul’s program ranked No. 29 (up from 35) nationally and No. 9 (up from No. 10) in the Midwest.
DePaul also ranked No. 29 (up from 30) in the 2023 “World’s Best Programs for Entrepreneurship” ranking of MBA in entrepreneurship programs issued by Poets & Quants, a popular online news source for prospective business students.
DePaul offers a business major and MBA and Master of Science degrees in entrepreneurship. These academic programs are complemented by co-curricular programming hosted by the
Coleman Entrepreneurship Center and
Women in Entrepreneurship Institute at DePaul.
Building on its reputation for entrepreneurship education, DePaul has been expanding initiatives that empower entrepreneurs across the university and in the Chicago community, says
Bruce Leech, executive director of the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center. These initiatives include:
- A new required course, Business 101: Business Fundamentals and the Entrepreneurial Mindset, in the
revised undergraduate business program that debuted at DePaul this fall. The culminating project for students in this course is a business pitch competition called the Driehaus Cup, with winners taking home scholarships and a Driehaus Cup trophy.
- “Introduction to Entrepreneurship,” a new class open to any DePaul student interested in entrepreneurship.
- A new online Entrepreneurship certificate program launching in January, one of the offerings of the business college’s new
Executive Education at DePaul.
- The new Halperin Emerging Company Fund, which will make equity investments in DePaul student and alumni startups that have the potential for growth and job creation.
“We want to provide students across campus the opportunity to develop entrepreneurial thinking,” Leech says. “We also have an active mentorship program, internship program, workshops and other annual pitch competitions to further nurture entrepreneurship in our community.”
DePaul’s efforts to cultivate the entrepreneurial mindset have had an impressive long-term impact on alumni entrepreneur activity. DePaul alumni have founded more than 1,000 ventures in the past 10 years, and collectively they have raised $121 million in capital, according to data collected for The Princeton Review survey.
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