Fresh out of Colorado College, Noah Gostout came to Case Western Reserve University in August. A competitive cyclist and avid rock climber, he didn’t enjoy his first rainy autumn in Cleveland. The fact his car was broken into twice, with the thieves getting away with a total of 95 cents and an audio book, didn’t help.
“I’ll never know how the book ends,” he jokes today.
Gostout shares the gloomy details of his early days here to make a point: He could have gone anywhere in the country for a graduate degree, but he chose CWRU. The son of two Mayo Clinic doctors, he believes there’s no better place to be right now.
Gostout is studying entrepreneurial physics, one of the two-year Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Programs offered at the university. He came here knowing he was interested in medical technology and knowing he wanted to be an owner or employee of a startup rather than joining a large, established company.
“I want to be involved in creating and not just completing tasks,” he says. “Here, you’re right in the thick of it. Half of the professors are involved in projects with hospitals, imaging and other areas.”
At the encouragement of program professor Bruce Terry, Gostout applied for and got a job at BioEnterprise, a nonprofit near Case that helps health care companies commercialize bioscience technologies.
“Nearly every day there is something I can take from my classes and apply at work,” he says. “It’s amazing how applicable the STEP program is.”
In fact, entrepreneurship education is growing at nearly every college and university in Northeast Ohio. And a variety of joint efforts to jump start the regional economy are encouraging students to see themselves not just as job seekers but as potential job creators whose new ventures will help build wealth for the region.
Baldwin-Wallace College added an undergraduate major in innovation and entrepreneurship in fall 2011, expanding its already popular entrepreneurship MBA program and undergraduate minor. It is a good fit for the school where accounting is still king with the number of undergraduate majors growing from 132 to 208 in the past five years and the accounting MBA nearly doubling its enrollment in three.
B-W is one of four local schools (with CWRU, Kent State University and Lorain County Community College) awarded a combined $3.2 million grant to start Blackstone LaunchPad programs this year to give aspiring entrepreneurs access to tools and mentors who can help them transform their untested ideas into viable companies. Collectively, these four campuses reach more than 70,000 students.
“Northeast Ohio has made great progress reinventing itself by returning to its entrepreneurial roots,” says Deborah D. Hoover, president and CEO of The Burton D. Morgan Foundation, one of Blackstone’s local partners. She adds that LaunchPad will help to demystify entrepreneurship as a career path and spur startups here. Its goal: To create as many as 150 businesses and generate more than 3,000 direct jobs over the next five years.
For students without an entrepreneurial bent, institutions are seeing increased interest in majors tied to health care, technology, engineering and interdisciplinary hybrids that merge our region’s past strengths with emerging industries.
The University of Akron’s College of Engineering, for example, is the fastest-growing engineering program in the state and the fourth-fastest in the nation. Its enrollment, now 2,450, has risen 77 percent since 2004.
Dan Nish graduated from the University of Akron with a mechanical engineering degree in December. He credits the engineering co-op program, which alternates semesters of on-campus study with semesters of full-time employment in the field, with setting students on their career path early and motivating them to persevere through rigorous academics.
“So many of my friends came back [to the classroom] and worked harder after seeing what was available to them in the workplace,” he says.
Nish, who admits to being “picky,” interviewed with 16 companies and got offers from about 95 percent of them before joining W.H. Gardiner in Solon as a sales engineer. He designs and sells commercial air conditioning systems.
In fall 2010, the school introduced a new undergraduate degree in corrosion and reliability engineering. It is the first university in the nation to do so. Students there will focus on extending the lifespan and reliability of everything from underground gas pipelines to surgical implants. Public and private partners are pouring in.
As Northeast Ohio’s health care sector continues to grow and evolve, universities are expanding their offerings to meet demand. Catherine Koppelman, chief nursing officer for University Hospitals, says thousands more nurses will be needed in our region by 2020. The aging population, an aging nursing workforce and health care reform that stresses wellness and skilled care are all factors leading to the growing demand.
Nursing education, which allows students to enter and exit the classroom at various levels of professional development (from licensed practical nurse to a bachelor’s degree in nursing and beyond) is poised to take advantage of the changes.
Kent State has seen its undergraduate nursing program increase from 517 majors in 2000 to 1,478 this year. The University of Mount Union, with 57 students enrolled in its two-year master of science physician assistant program, is witnessing great interest among employers. Its August 2011 graduating class had “an extremely high employment rate, soon after graduation if not before,” says Rebecca Doak, executive director of Mount Union’s Center for Student Success and Career Development.
Case Western Reserve added a graduate certificate in wireless health in the fall of 2011. Thirty students are enrolled in this health care/technology hybrid, which is actually taught in San Diego, offered online here and has students enrolled from as far away as Toronto.
The University of Akron’s popular graduate nurse anesthesia program is in great demand from students as well as potential employers.
“We’ve never had a student not get a job,” says Brian Radesic, nursing instructor and associate director of the program. “Last year, Cleveland Clinic needed 10 all at once. This year, University Hospitals hired four or five.”
Kevin Frank worked as a nurse in critical care, surgical intensive care and burn units for more than a decade then sold medical equipment before deciding to enroll in the rigorous 27-month program. Frank graduates in August and already has three job offers.
In some cases, though, the jobs of the future have not yet caught up with the students of the present.
Since Baldwin-Wallace created the sustainability major in the fall of 2008 with seven students, the program has expanded to almost 50. While interest among students is growing, employer demand still hasn’t quite caught up, according to David Krueger, B-W’s director of the Institute for Sustainable Business and the sustainability major. “The field is still too young,” he says.
That hasn’t stopped Madeline Ashwill, of Parma Heights, who studied international affairs at George Washington University in D.C. before returning to Northeast Ohio to study sustainability at Baldwin-Wallace.
“Sustainability and environmental protection will always be relevant in a world with 7 billion people whose standards of living continue to rise,” Ashwill says.
Ashwill, 21, parlayed an online volunteer opportunity into a paid internship at the International Services Center, a refugee resettlement and immigration services agency in Cleveland, in the summer of her junior year.
“It was a perfect blend of sustainability, my major, and international affairs, my minor,” she says.
At the International Services Center, Ashwill managed the agency’s new market garden project, including building raised beds, treating the soil, ordering supplies, coordinating volunteers and balancing the budget. She also taught English, helped refugees write resumes and took them to job interviews.
She got the agency to sign a three-year letter of intent with B-W. As a result, the agency and the school each agreed to cover 50 percent of the internship stipend ($1,100) for one intern each year.
Last summer, she added a “life journey experience” to her college portfolio by hiking the entire Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine — 2,181 miles.
“My thru-hike allowed me to connect with nature in a way that everyday life makes extremely difficult,” Ashwill says. “Living in the woods for five months has only made me more concerned with protecting the natural beauty of the earth.”
While Ashwill hopes to work for an environmental advocacy group, a nonprofit that promotes local and organic food, or an organization such as the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, she says she’s less optimistic now about finding work in her field than she was when she first came to B-W.
With a May graduation approaching, she knows that establishing a career in sustainability will require even more bold moves than she took while she was in school.
“The demand will grow as more companies see the need to integrate sustainability practices into their organizations,” adds Krueger.
Maybe it will also come from Northeast Ohio’s new crop of entrepreneurs.
Prior to coming to Cleveland, Noah Gostout says he was always looking for the right “genius idea” that he could apply in a startup of his own. His first semester here fundamentally changed that as he learned most successful startups generally grow from need-based innovation.
“If you start from the need, you really get a good fit,” he explains.
Gostout knows there’s a lot of money to be made and lost in medical technology, but that’s not what drives him.
“If you’re only focused on making money, you’re probably not going to take risks,” he says. “I would much rather be paid less and have higher job satisfaction. I want to make transformative change to society, whether I fail or succeed.”
Gostout is one of 25 students enrolled in STEP, a program CWRU started in 1999. In addition to physics, the program offers master’s of science degrees in biology on an entrepreneurial biotechnology track and in chemistry.
STEP executive director Ed Caner says Northeast Ohio has a shortage of CEOs for high-tech startups — particularly startups that are born out of research — and a shortage of entrepreneurially minded young people trained in innovation.
“STEP helps alleviate the latter, which helps support a culture of entrepreneurship in the region,” Caner says.
His students have been responsible for bringing $30 million in working capital to the region (mostly through million-dollar grants) over the past five years. That success has attracted CEOs from Boston and Silicon Valley who are willing to serve as mentors.
“In 10 years, we are hoping that some of our grads will be homegrown CEOs,” he adds.