Entrepreneurs Aren’t Born — They Are Taught (Even in High School)

Almost three decades ago, American economist and Nobel Prize winner Kenneth Arrow hypothesized that because entrepreneurship is essentially random, education is unlikely to have a significant impact on the creation of new ventures.

“It turns out Arrow’s hypothesis is likely wrong,” says Darden professor Saras Sarasvathy, an authority on the cognitive basis of high-performance entrepreneurship.

Sarasvathy’s recent paper, “Nationwide Entrepreneurship Content in Secondary Schools: Impact on Entrepreneurial Careers,” coauthored with Kristian Nielsen of Aalborg University in Aalborg, Denmark, and Stephan Heiblich of the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada, finds evidence for measurable positive impacts from teaching young people about business and entrepreneurship.

The paper, published in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, analyzes the effects of nationwide entrepreneurship education in secondary schools in Denmark. It provides some of the strongest evidence yet that entrepreneurship education in high school can increase the likelihood that students will start substantial business ventures — with revenue and employees — both right after graduation and later in their careers.

A Natural Experiment in Real Time

In 2005, Denmark implemented an educational reform that required two types of secondary schools — specifically business and technical schools — to teach entrepreneurship, while general schools remained unchanged. This created what researchers call a “quasi-natural experiment,” allowing them to compare the outcomes of students who received entrepreneurship education with those who didn't, before and after the reform.

The Results: Small Numbers, Big Impact

The findings of that comparison were striking. Obviously, the percentage of secondary school students launching revenue-producing companies within three years of graduating high school is small to begin with. That’s why the increase in absolute numbers appears small — we're talking about increasing startup rates from around 1% to 1.4%. However, the relative impact was enormous, representing a 40% increase in the likelihood of starting a business.

Interestingly, the positive effects were primarily observed in business schools rather than in technical schools. Both types of schools added entrepreneurship content, but the business schools went deeper, incorporating business skills like sales, finance and accounting alongside entrepreneurship. The technical schools, which mainly added general entrepreneurship awareness to their science-heavy curricula, didn't see the same boost in startup rates.

This suggests something important: it's not enough to just tell students that entrepreneurship is an option or try to pump up their confidence. Students need real, practical business skills to make the leap from idea to actual company.

Family Matters

One of the findings involves family influence. Students with entrepreneurial parents saw much bigger benefits from the entrepreneurship education. For children whose parents had started businesses, education boosted their startup probability by 1.1 percentage points, compared with 0.3 percentage points for those who didn’t grow up in entrepreneurial families.

We know that having entrepreneurial role models at home makes a huge difference. But what's particularly encouraging is that entrepreneurship education also boosted students who lacked that built-in advantage, even if the increase was smaller. This suggests that schools can compensate for what some kids don't get at home.

The Long Game: Shaping Career Paths

The study didn't just look at startups created immediately after high school graduation. The researchers also examined how entrepreneurship education influenced students' longer-term career choices — their college majors, first jobs and the types of companies they joined. What they found was positive impact of entrepreneurship education on each of those “indirect effects.”

Students who received entrepreneurship education were more likely to choose college programs and jobs that would position them for future venture creation. They were less likely to end up at large corporations and more likely to enter industries or pursue education in fields where startup rates are typically higher. In other words, even if they didn't start businesses right away, they were positioning themselves to do so later.

This might be the more important finding overall. Most successful entrepreneurs don't start companies straight out of high school or even college; they gain experience, build networks and develop expertise first. Entrepreneurship education at the secondary-school level appears to be steering students toward career paths that will better prepare them for future entrepreneurship.

Quality Over Quantity Concerns

Critics might worry that encouraging more students to start businesses could lead to a flood of low-quality ventures that fail quickly. But the Danish study found no evidence of that. The companies started by graduates from the reformed high schools performed just as well as other startups in terms of sales, even during the challenging economic period following the 2008 financial crisis.

It’s worth noting that Saraswathy and her co-authors didn't just rely on surveys or self-reported entrepreneurial intentions. They tracked actual company formation within three years of the founder's high school graduation. They used Denmark's business registry, which requires new ventures to meet strict criteria for economic activity, including industry-specific sales levels. In other words, this wasn't about counting lemonade stands or side hustles.

What This Means Going Forward

These findings have significant implications for how we think about entrepreneurship education. First, Sarasvathy, Nielsen and Heblich suggest that we should be investing in high-quality content and teacher training in business and entrepreneurship at the secondary school level.

They also advocate for a “tiered approach,” which involves providing everyone with basic entrepreneurship literacy while offering more advanced training for those who want it. This aligns with Sarasvathy’s previous work on the “entrepreneurial method,” which encourages the teaching of entrepreneurship to all students at all levels.

Second, the study highlights the importance of having practical business skills. Teaching students about opportunity recognition and building their confidence is great, but they also need to understand finance, marketing, sales, and operations if they're going to launch enduring ventures.

Third, Sarasvathy’s research suggests that entrepreneurship education in high school could make university-level entrepreneurship programs more effective by giving students a stronger foundation.

“Instead of approaching entrepreneurship as a peripheral add-on in college, students would arrive with clearer motivations for using the entrepreneurial method in new ways in all their majors and career choices, from the arts and humanities to the sciences and professions,” says Sarasvathy. “The students with aspirations for becoming entrepreneurs will come to college with realistic expectations about what launching a new venture really involves.”

Much has changed since Kenneth Arrow’s hypothesis that entrepreneurship need not be taught. Today, entrepreneurship is widely recognized as a key driver of innovation, economic growth and job creation. In response, governments around the world are shaping policies to boost entrepreneurship training and education.

While the Danish study does not provide a definitive answer to all questions about entrepreneurship education, it sheds light on what works. As Sarasvathy puts it, “The study offers compelling evidence that entrepreneurship education is not a long shot and shouldn’t be a shot in the dark. It shows that it’s time to invest in well-designed programs that reach more young people, because those programs do make a difference.”

“Nationwide Entrepreneurship Content in Secondary Schools: Impact on Entrepreneurial Careers,” by Kristian Nielsen, Stephan Heblich, and Saras D. Sarasvathy, was published in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal in 2025.