Yianni Constantinou, a senior at the University of Connecticut, always had an interest in business while growing up in Oxford, Connecticut. He volunteered for student council fundraisers and joined his high school’s chapter of Future Business Leaders of America.
So when his mother received a pamphlet in the mail for a nine-day, immersive pre-college business and entrepreneurship program run by the National Student Leadership Conference (NSLC) in 2019, he decided to give it a try. The leadership program teaches students how to build a business and includes a competition in which they pitch it to a panel of experts. It also includes program offerings such as aerospace engineering, artificial intelligence, fashion management, and sports management. Students hear talks by Inc. 5000 entrepreneurs and have opportunities to network with them.
Constantinou attended the program at Fordham University over the summer, working with a group of other students on two business simulations. In one, they orchestrated partnership deals for a fictitious company; in the other, they participated in a product pitch simulation.
Now studying business management at UConn’s School of Business, Constantinou liked the program so much he came back in 2022 as a head team advisor and last summer as a program director, guiding new students.
“Outside of teaching business education, it’s the mentorship aspect I really liked and the connections I was able to form with some of these students,” he says. “You really see them grow, which is just incredible.”
The 21-year-old plans to bring what he learned to a corporate career and is looking for jobs after graduation in business strategy or human resources, where he can be an entrepreneur within an organization.
“I think entrepreneurship is a really cool concept and something that aligns with me,” he says. “At this point in my life, starting my own business is not in my path immediately, though it would be cool to do. Taking that mindset to a company is a really cool path for me to follow.”
The NSLC program, founded in 1989, is an example of how entrepreneurship education—once a subject that some academic experts said could not be taught—has caught on as an extracurricular activity as younger generations of digital natives embrace the idea of starting businesses. According to the Deloitte 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, 45% of Gen Zers and 36% of millennials in the workplace now have side hustles such as selling products online, gig work, consulting, or artistic pursuits.
However, schools have been slow to adopt teaching entrepreneurship. The GEM 2023/2024 Global Report, a sweeping study of 49 economies led by a consortium of educators from prestigious universities around the world, concluded in 2024 that “Despite incremental improvement in some cases, entrepreneurial education at school in most economies continued to be assessed as poor…” Entrepreneurship education was assessed as “satisfactory” in just five economies.
The privately-run NSLC program targets students in grades six to 12, with separate programs for middle schoolers and high schoolers, offering an optional one-credit course in partnership with American University. Students are housed in supervised dorms at 14 universities, where they study leadership and other coursework and tour local companies and attractions. Students are nominated for the program by teachers, counselors, and NSLC alumni, or identified via the College Board Student Search Service and ACT Educational Opportunity Service (EOS). They must have a minimum GPA of 3.0.
“What we try to do is expose students to the myriad of careers, possibilities, and opportunities,” says Kristina Duffy Hochman, executive director of the NSLC, whose father, Richard Duffy—an entrepreneur and educator—founded the organization. “Kids come in with a general interest in business or entrepreneurship and leave with a better understanding of what resonates with them. Some kids come in and say, ‘I saw Shark Tank and I want to be that person,’ and then discover, ‘I’m really a finance person,’ or ‘I’m really a marketing person.’ We teach them a broader range of skills and expose them to a broader range of careers.”
Many parents and students are responding, with the NSLC seeing a 30% increase in demand for its business and entrepreneurship programming each of the past three years, she says. Last year, nearly 1,000 students on five campuses participated. This year, the program will take place on six campuses: Columbia, Duke, the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles, the University of Michigan, and Yale.
The program, for which tuition ranges from $4,000 to $4,300, distributes more than $500,000 in scholarships per year through an application process that starts in the spring, she says. “Unfortunately, there are costs associated with running these programs, but we are super passionate about increasing access,” says Duffy Hochman.
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