The Princeton Review and U.S. News & World Report recently published rankings of university entrepreneurship. Among the top 12 schools, the two lists share but a single institution — Babson College. How can two highly regarded agencies compile lists of excellence that have virtually no overlap?
At one level, the answer is obvious: The two groups use different criteria and so arrive at different rankings. But the use of two sets of criteria that yield such wildly differing results suggests a much deeper problem. A lack of consensus regarding what to measure implies a lack of consensus about the goals of university entrepreneurship: It’s hard to measure success when you don’t know what that success looks like. So what is the role of entrepreneurship at the university?
