Undergraduate Blog / Admission

21!

This morning the Babson community woke up to the news that US News & World Report ranked Babson College the #1 undergraduate school for entrepreneurship for the 21st consecutive year! This means that Babson has been #1 in entrepreneurship longer than the iPhone, Google, and Facebook have existed. Our first number one ranking came in 1996, when we were watching movies like Jerry Maguire, dancing the Macarena, listening to the Spice Girls and taping ER on our VCRs. Most notably, most of our current students weren’t even born yet.

It is truly an honor to be celebrated for our entrepreneurial mindset-the key to what makes Babson different from every other institution in the US. It also does turn up the pressure on the Babson community to continue to remember why entrepreneurship matters. At Babson, entrepreneurship is not simply about focusing on the business world as it was or even is today-it’s about creating a vision for what business should be. That’s why it is so exciting to be at Babson today!

There is no way we could be recognized for entrepreneurship for two decades without evolving our approach to an entrepreneurial business education. The curriculum, the teaching, even the student body is constantly innovating ways to promote Entrepreneurship of All Kinds ®. Babson entrepreneurs are bankers, accountants, event planners, fashionistas, data analysts, venture capitalists, foodies, artists, poets and, yes, a few have been on Shark Tank.

Three years after our first #1 ranking, the first year signature class, Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship, was developed to provide our first year students the opportunity to really understand how to run a business by actually doing just that. Each year, our first-year students create, develop, launch and run a business with start-up money from Babson. Every student has a job at their “start-up”- from CEO, to strategist, to IT. They spend the year learning not only to succeed in business…but, almost more importantly, what happens if you fail. This is a prime example of what makes Babson a place where “ideas turn to action”.

While it is truly an honor to be recognized for the 21st time, we also know that these accolades must not be taken for granted. We still have a lot of work to do, and will continue to innovate, to question the status quo, and to ask how entrepreneurship will make business and the world better. That’s what gets us up in the morning. That’s Babson.