Building an entrepreneurial mindset before graduation

This article is authored by S Jeyavelu, fellow IIMA, professor and director, Amity Business School, Amity University Bengaluru.

For generations, the deal in Indian higher education was simple: Work hard, earn a degree and a job will follow. That deal is now under strain.

Career and education (Representational image). (Unsplash)

The Economic Survey 2023-24 estimates that India needs to create an average of nearly 78.5 lakh non-farm jobs a year until 2030 to keep pace with its growing workforce. At the same time, AI is changing what those jobs look like. Employers surveyed for the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 expect 39 per cent of workers' core skills to change by 2030.

Entry-level jobs have traditionally been where young people learn how work gets done: solving messy problems, working in teams, dealing with customers and recovering from mistakes. AI is beginning to automate some of the routine tasks through which young employees once learnt those lessons. The implications for India are still unfolding, but this raises an important question for universities: If graduates have fewer opportunities to learn through routine entry-level work, where will they build judgement, resilience and problem-solving skills?

Universities will increasingly have to provide some of that experience before students enter the workforce.

Entrepreneurship is not the only way to build these capabilities, but it offers an unusually concentrated way to do so. A student team trying to win real customers has to make decisions with incomplete information, settle disagreements, respond to feedback and start again after failing. Only some will go on to run companies, but everyone who tries will carry the experience into whatever work they choose.

Our job as educators is, therefore, not simply to encourage more students to become entrepreneurs. It is to make entrepreneurship easier to try without forcing them to bet their entire future on it. Universities need to lower the risk of trying.

That takes four shifts in approach and four practical steps.

• Speed up the routine work, make time to reflect: AI tools can accelerate desk research, data synthesis, survey design and early prototyping. But students still need to speak to customers, test assumptions in the real world and make decisions when the evidence is unclear. The time AI saves should create more room for these experiences and for structured reflection on what worked, what failed and why. Reflection is how experience turns into judgement.
• Lower the stakes of trying: Working with industry, government and philanthropists, universities can offer student founders livelihood stipends and shared spaces to live and work while they test an idea. This can ease financial pressure, reduce anxiety at home and give students time to find out whether an idea is worth pursuing.
• Treat the campus as a laboratory of life: Young people spend much of their day on screens, which makes real-world experience even more valuable. Universities should let students run small businesses on campus, take on local social problems and test ideas with real users. Along the way, they learn how to negotiate, collaborate, solve problems and take responsibility for outcomes.
• Back students across disciplines and ideas: Entrepreneurship support should not be limited to the engineering student with a deep-tech idea. A humanities student building a low-tech, high-touch venture should also have a way in. The starting point should be simple: every student should have access to the first layer of entrepreneurship support, regardless of discipline or the kind of idea they want to pursue. Universities should widen the definition of entrepreneurship to include social challenges, climate solutions, creative enterprises and emerging sectors.
• Create entrepreneurial third spaces: Students need places outside the classroom where engineering, design, business and humanities students actually meet. Clubs, ideathons and hackathons can give them a reason to. Mentors should include unconventional entrepreneurs, including those whose ventures succeeded and those whose ventures did not. Here, a student can begin an entrepreneurial journey with relatively little at stake.
• Build fab studios: Hardware, deep-tech and biotech ideas need makers' labs, prototyping and testing equipment, computing power and simulators. If a dedicated facility is too expensive, universities can share infrastructure across academic departments. With the right equipment and expert support, students can move from an idea to an early prototype far faster.
• Make the curriculum flexible: Universities should give academic credit for activities such as market research, prototyping and testing a business model. A serious venture could count in place of a summer internship or capstone project. Students should also have enough academic flexibility to build at a pace suited to the venture. The National Education Policy 2020 already provides the broader policy direction for flexible, multidisciplinary and experiential learning. Universities can extend that principle to venture building without giving up academic rigour.
• Offer deferred and startup placements: For many student founders, the biggest worry is giving up campus placement. A deferred placement policy can reduce that risk by keeping placement support open for up to three years after graduation. Universities should also formally recognise internships and jobs at startups so students can choose that path without feeling that they have stepped outside the conventional career system.

No university needs to do all eight at once. Some of the most important changes cost relatively little and can be made quickly: academic credit for venture work, startups in place of internships or capstones, and deferred placement support.

Stipends, fab studios and entrepreneurial third spaces will take longer and require partners. Founder alumni can return as mentors. Industry can open real projects to student teams. Philanthropic and government partners can help reduce the financial risk for students trying to build.

The goal is not to turn every graduate into a founder. It is to ensure that students leave university having had the chance to make decisions, test ideas, work through uncertainty and recover from failure before those lessons become high-stakes.

If universities get this right, graduates will leave not only prepared to find work, but equipped to create opportunities for themselves and others.

That is the deal higher education now needs to offer.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by S Jeyavelu, fellow IIMA, professor and director, Amity Business School, Amity University Bengaluru.