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Surprise!

A Houston School Stuns the Ivy League Giants, Ranks Third in America in Entrepreneur Power

BY // 12.07.15

The University of Houston is not just winning on the football field.

The oft-dismissed and doubted school in the heart of the fourth largest city in the United States does not rely on Tom Herman for all its victories. The classroom can come through in a big way, too.

UH has been named the third best college in all of America for entrepreneurs. If you want to chart your own way, starting on Cullen Boulevard is a smart first move. Houston finished ahead of a plethora of big-name, hoity-toity reputation schools, including all the Ivy League powers (though Harvard did take No. 1 overall in the separate category of Best Graduate Schools For Entrepreneurs).

These entrepreneur school rankings come from the highly respected Princeton Review. In other words, these are not just rankings for the sake of rankings. There is a real methodology behind the lists. Princeton Review examined more than 300 undergraduate and graduate business schools, evaluating them in three main areas: 1). Academics 2). Faculty and Students and 3). Outside the Classroom Entrepreneur Experiences.

The University of Houston scored major points for having a specific center built around fostering future entrepreneurs. The Cyvia and Melvyn Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship in the C.T. Bauer College of Business has its own startup accelerator and co-working space right on campus. Since 2013 alone, 17 new companies have launched out of these RED labs.

That type of real-world success gives UH an edge that few undergraduate programs can match.

The only two universities in America that beat out Houston are Babson College, a small, 2,220-student school in Wellesley, Mass., that is entirely focused on churning out entrepreneurs, and Brigham Young University. Every student at Babson must enroll in a course called Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship, which gives each student a $3,000 loan to start a business. By the end of their freshmen year, Babson students are required to pay that loan back and donate the profits from their new business to charity.

BYU, the Mormon school with a relatively inexpensive $5,000 tuition, is home to an entrepreneur boot camp.

No one said becoming an entrepreneur is easy. But if you’re a Cougar, you at least have a head start.

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