A recent report from the Network For Teaching Entrepreneurship suggests that many young people today lack the skills needed to thrive in the future. Their answer, unsurprisingly, is that entrepreneurial skills would stand young people in good stead.

It’s part of a general theme that aims to promote entrepreneurship among the young, whether to provide them with new skills, offer them financial independence, or even to promote community development. Indeed, the UN’s 2020 World Youth Report suggested that youth entrepreneurship was crucial not only to the development of young people but also to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

Faltering ambitions

Unfortunately, research from HEC Paris argues that many of the schemes to promote youth entrepreneurship do little to actually achieve those goals.

“Despite the increase in policies and initiatives around entrepreneurship, the annual rate of new firm creation has decreased for decades in epicenters of entrepreneurship, including Silicon Valley,” the authors explain. “Moreover, despite the idolization of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs as successful entrepreneurs who dropped out of university, studies have shown that older entrepreneurs outperform younger founders.”

For many years, entrepreneurship has been the vehicle through which young people have been encouraged to follow their passions and make a difference in the world.

The problem is that it’s relying on capitalism to solve problems that have often been caused by capitalism. What’s more, the promotion of entrepreneurship often has a moral element to it, as though it’s a virtuous way for the young to make a difference. This can make it seem like the only way.

Rose tinted

It can also create a very rose-tinted perspective on entrepreneurship, with the challenges overlooked. Indeed, it’s increasingly well understood that many self-employed people live below the poverty line.

“In hopes of improving their own livelihoods and doing social good, these young people may incur more debt after having wasted years in which they could have been learning job skills or taken other career paths,” the researchers say. “But then the flip side is that youth who bought into entrepreneurship, then fail, might actually leave it more jaded and more hopeless. It actually might lead them on to extremism, because they’re actually worse off than they were before.”

That’s not to say that young people shouldn’t be encouraged to be entrepreneurs, but more that program leaders should tread carefully and ensure that the risks involved are communicated clearly. The researchers believe that there needs to be clarity around the aims of the programs; a clear linking of financial and nonfinancial support; better monitoring of progress to allow young people to pivot into alternative career paths; and a general embracing of alternative visions of entrepreneurship and what it entails.

“As you deliver these entrepreneurship programs for youth, be very intentional and honest about what you’re actually offering them,” they conclude. “Give youth alternative pathways and ways out if their entrepreneurial path doesn’t look that great, so they can focus on pathways that show actual promise, pathways they can actually invest in for the long haul.”