Rice’s graduate entrepreneurship program ranked No. 2 in US

Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business has the No. 2 graduate entrepreneurship program in the U.S. (up from No. 3 last year), according to the 2018 rankings announced Nov. 14 by the Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine. This marks the Jones School’s highest ranking and the ninth year in a row the school has been ranked as a top 10 graduate program in entrepreneurship, one of only three schools to be consistently among the top 10 for that period.

McNair Hall, home of Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business.

The new ranking was based on a survey from May through August of more than 300 schools offering programs in entrepreneurship studies. The 60-question survey looked at each school’s commitment to entrepreneurship education inside and outside the classroom. More than 40 data points were analyzed to determine the rankings. Topics included the percentage of faculty, students and alumni actively and successfully involved in entrepreneurial endeavors, the number and reach of mentorship programs, scholarships and grants for entrepreneurial studies, and the level of support for school-sponsored business plan competitions. The rankings will be published in the December issue of Entrepreneur magazine.

The Jones School’s entrepreneurship program was founded in 1978 by nationally recognized faculty led by Al Napier and Edward Williams. Today the school offers more than 30 courses taught by professors with significant entrepreneurial experience.

The Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, led by Managing Director Brad Burke, has been a global leader in the creation and commercialization of new products and technologies since the alliance’s founding in 2000. The Rice Alliance hosts the Rice Business Plan Competition, the world’s largest and richest student startup competition. Teams have launched 181 companies and raised more than $1.8 billion in funding in the 17 years of the competition. Additional Rice Alliance educational and entrepreneurship ecosystem development efforts have impacted more than 2,000 startups founded by students as well as community members. Over the past decade Jones School alumni have created 240 businesses, raised $4 billion in funding and hired 7,787 employees, according to the school’s surveys. More than four out of five of the companies are still open.

Burke is also executive director of the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers, which represents more than 225 university entrepreneurship programs and is housed at Rice.

Rice’s student startup accelerator, OwlSpark, was founded in 2013 and offers a summer program that provides teams of students and recent alumni with the funding, space, industrial and academic mentorship and networking opportunities required to launch their companies. OwlSpark is managed by Kerri Smith from the Rice Alliance, who also leads Rice’s partnership with the University of Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech University and UT MD Anderson Cancer Center in launching the Southwest NSF I-Corps Node in Texas.

The Jones School’s strong commitment to entrepreneurship was reinforced by the launch of the Rice Entrepreneurship Initiative in fall 2015 as a cross-disciplinary initiative to provide students from across the university with skills and knowledge to succeed in a world where entrepreneurial capabilities are increasingly critical for meaningful and influential careers. In October the initiative celebrated the opening of the new Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which features new and expanded entrepreneurship courses as well as a variety of co-curricular activities and resources with the goal of supporting Rice students in entrepreneurial endeavors. The initiative is led by Yael Hochberg, the Ralph S. O’Connor Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship at the Jones School. She is considered one of the foremost experts on accelerator programs and serves as managing director of the annual Seed Accelerator Rankings Project.

The Rice Entrepreneurs Organization is an additional example of the full complement of innovative programs and opportunities Rice graduate students have to translate ideas into action.

To view the complete rankings, visit www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings/top-entrepreneur.