Episode 117: Antwon Foreman on How Entrepreneurship Enables Student Success
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How can higher education institutions expand the definition – and impact! – of entrepreneurship beyond the startup to maximize student success? What skills and relationships can students build and how can they apply them whether they start a company or a non-profit or work within a larger business as someone who know how to actually get things done, creating, communicating, solving problems? How can colleges and companies build mutually beneficial ecosystems make this happen? We talk through these with Antwon Foreman, the entrepreneurship professor and Founder of the social business support-u.org.
Beyond the Startup: Cultivating an Entrepreneurial Mindset for Modern Student Success
What comes to mind when you hear the word entrepreneurship? For many, it conjures up images of tech founders raising venture capital, building the next viral app, or launching a retail empire. But if we restrict our view of entrepreneurship to just startups, we miss a massive opportunity to transform higher education and maximize student success.
True student development goes far beyond preparing someone to write a business plan. It is about instilling an entrepreneurial mindset—a universal toolkit that empowers students to create, communicate, and deliver value, no matter their major or ultimate career path. Whether a student wants to start a non-profit, climb the corporate ladder, or work within a government agency, the ability to solve problems and manage ambiguity is what sets them apart.
To better understand how this framework is reshaping higher education, Elliot Felix sat down with Antwon Foreman, an entrepreneurship professor and founder of Support U, on the Connected College podcast. Foreman shared his disruptive approach to experiential learning, ecosystem design, and how the gig economy is giving this generation a whole new outlook on career security.
How to Redefine and Measure Student Success
In the traditional higher education model, student success is often treated as a checklist of inputs and standard metrics: retention rates, grade point averages, and graduation percentages. But if we shift our perspective to view higher education through a professional lens, a different picture emerges. Under this view, true success isn’t just about making students career-ready; it’s about actual career positioning and real-world execution.
When students are actively doing the work while still in school, the stakes are raised, and their learning accelerates. Setting aggressive, multi-dimensional goals can radically transform a student's trajectory. A high-impact benchmark is to challenge students to achieve a clear trifecta by their senior year: a corporate job offer, an acceptance into graduate school, and a revenue-generating business.
Encouraging students to develop at least two of these three options gives them unprecedented agency over their futures. This model shifts the focus from passive learning to active development. When students are pushed to activate their skills early, they enter the workforce not as novices looking for direction, but as proven performers who know how to navigate complex ecosystems.
The Power of the Entrepreneurial Mindset Across Disciplines
When higher education institutions expand the definition of entrepreneurship beyond business schools, it becomes a powerful driver for campus-wide student development. At its core, entrepreneurship is built on four fundamental pillars:
Creating value
Communicating value
Positioning value
Leveraging value
When you frame entrepreneurship through these universal skills, it instantly applies to every single discipline on campus. Liberal arts, theater, engineering, and science majors all need to understand how to pull out the inherent value of their degrees to solve real-world problems.
By embedded experiential learning projects into the academic year, institutions can connect students directly with corporate partners and government entities, such as the Department of Energy or the Department of Defense. Working on year-round, cross-disciplinary projects allows students to build robust portfolios. They graduate with years of full-cycle experience rather than just a brief summer internship.
This deep engagement helps students land higher starting salaries and fast-track into management roles straight out of undergrad. They learn the ultimate business lesson early: they are their own first business, their own first product, and their own first investment.
Navigating the Gig Economy and Shifting Student Perspectives
The rapid rise of the gig economy—driven by platforms like Fiverr, Uber, DoorDash, and digital dropshipping—has dramatically lowered the barriers to entry for young creators. Today's college students are entering business and testing ideas long before they ever step into an economics classroom. This shift is heavily influenced by a profound cultural change in how this generation views traditional employment.
Many of today's students have watched their parents or grandparents dedicate decades to a single company, only to struggle with retirement, lack work-life balance, or face sudden corporate furloughs. Having witnessed these economic vulnerabilities, students are naturally skeptical of traditional, linear career paths.
Rather than putting all their eggs in one basket, they use the gig economy to keep their options open and build financial safety nets. Higher education institutions must acknowledge this reality. Instead of ignoring these micro-businesses, colleges should integrate gig-economy dynamics into the classroom, teaching students how to safely commercialize their knowledge and protect their economic well-being.
Embracing Intraprenuership: What Corporate Partners Need
As artificial intelligence and rapid technological innovation continue to disrupt industries, corporate partners are changing what they look for in new hires. Employers frequently ask for "self-starters," "go-getters," and individuals who are "highly adaptive to ambiguity." Even if companies hesitate to use the word, they are describing an entrepreneurial mindset.
The modern workforce does not just need passive employees who execute repetitive tasks without questioning inefficient processes. Organizations need intrapreneurs—professionals who possess an entrepreneurial spirit but choose to apply it within the security of an existing organization. These individuals view their job as their own business, constantly seeking ways to bring maximum value, identify operational gaps, and systemically pitch structured proposals to solve problems.
To survive and thrive in an AI-driven economy, cultivating this mindset across the entire student body is a national imperative. When we teach students how to adapt, persevere, and remain lifelong learners, we ensure they are ready to grow and elevate every organization they touch.
Summary: Designing a Connected College Ecosystem
True innovation in higher education happens when we stop operating in silos and begin designing genuine campus ecosystems where every stakeholder grows through mutual interaction. By broadening our definition of entrepreneurship, we unlock new pathways for student success that serve diverse majors and diverse career dreams.
If you want your institution to remain competitive and deeply relevant to this generation, it is time to shift from passive career preparation to active student empowerment. Equip your students to view themselves as their own finest investment, and watch them transform the workforce.
Episode 117 Transcript
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Antwon Foreman: I think for us to be able to survive even as a country as we grow, in terms of innovation and AI, we really need everyone to have that entrepreneurial mindset and that willingness to contribute and bring their best self to the table and grow everything that they touch, and that's really the core of entrepreneurship as a whole.
Elliot Felix: That was Antwon Foreman, entrepreneurship professor and founder of the social business supportu.org. We had a great conversation about expanding the definition and therefore the impact of entrepreneurship. We talked about the skills and relationships students build and how they can apply those, whether they start a company or a nonprofit, or if they work within a larger business as someone who actually knows how to get things done, creating, communicating, solving problems, and more. After you listen to this episode, if you wanna hear more from Antwon, he's also in episode one sixteen, which is a panel discussion I facilitated at eLive, and he made some amazing points about workforce development, connecting students to jobs with the right skills in the right place at the right time in the right way. Let's dive into this one. Welcome to the Connected College podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and the way they're organized to enable student success. Join me for insightful interviews with higher ed innovators, sharing the stories, stats, and strategies to create better connected colleges and universities. Welcome, Antwon. So excited for our conversation about the role that entrepreneurship plays in student success.
Antwon Foreman: It's great to be here. Thank you for having me, Elliot.
Elliot Felix: We met a little bit at eLive talking about workforce development and this intersection of colleges and companies, and I'm excited to pull on this thread, and maybe a great place to start is just hearing a little bit about your background, how you got started in higher ed, what you're up to today. I know you wear lots of different hats. All of them seem amazing.
Antwon Foreman: My start in higher ed was weird compared to most. I started as a student business at first and worked with the director of entrepreneurship at my institution North Carolina A&T State University, about how to help other students start businesses and kinda get experience in that weird you need experience to get experience cycle.
Elliot Felix: Yeah.
Antwon Foreman: And so I was the only student in my institution who had an office. Fast-forward, I grew that business. I started in marketing consulting and management consulting and grew it into a scaling consulting, turnkey operations and ecosystem design among other things. And that same professor called me back actually and said, "Hey, I know what you've been doing. I've seen your mastermind classes." My business has always been a social business. So what I mean by that is for every big client I would get, I would basically bring on students to train them how to solve certain problems, and then be able to grow their resume and position them in the ecosystem. He followed my work and said, "I want you to come back and teach, both to get that practical side into the classroom and to bridge the generational gap." He wanted me to apply, and I did and got the role. One class turned to two, two turned to four, and then when the dir...
Elliot Felix: As assigned, yeah.
Antwon Foreman: Slowly grew. And when Blackstone popped up I got tapped for that, and they asked me to be the director of the Blackstone LaunchPad at A&T. Over the last about three years, I've been able to position about 600 students into six-figure roles at graduation. 72 have collectively made $7.8 million in revenue through businesses, and embedding this experiential learning through entrepreneurship in the classrooms, and being able to prop up things like study abroad programs in entrepreneurship and other things. And now I'm actually in a kind of a limbo state with my contract at my current university, but the mission doesn't stop. So I have about 15 students nationally that I'm helping them start their business, some organizations and institutions that I'm helping them build entrepreneurial ecosystems and rebrand entrepreneurship on their campuses and/or within their organization to build in that entrepreneurial mindset, and really pushing to grow to make entrepreneurship more of a normal thing within our homes and within our organizations.
Elliot Felix: I love it. And so much of what you said resonates with me. I talk about I have been helping students since I was one and, through student government, and it sounds like you found path, like helping students be student entrepreneurs by yourself being a student entrepreneur. Like inception of entrepreneurship I love it. And just as a quick aside, like what is ecosystem design? I'm a designer I don't think I've designed an ecosystem, and I'm intrigued.
Antwon Foreman: Really, I think we use the word ecosystem oftentimes very loosely. It's turned into a buzzword, right? And what I push to both my clients and people I work with is, if they're not feed systems throughout that process where everyone is growing, then it's not a true ecosystem. If you think about nature, you have different levels of animals in nature, and you have lions, the antelope, the ants, but they all feed into the circle which they produce life. And in ecosystem design and kind of ecosystem architecture, you're looking at how do I bring in those stakeholders? How do I see what they value? Very similar to doing entrepreneurship consulting. And how do I create programs and structure in a way that they're able to build and grow together and feed off the outcomes of each other? And how do you do that so they're all making money, they're all getting the values that they need, and they're able to truly grow through those interactions and everything is mutually beneficial.
Elliot Felix: What's a what's an example of one of your favorite companies you worked with to create that kind of mutually beneficial ecosystem?
Antwon Foreman: Really it's funny because when you say favorite company, student business is popping in my head first now 'cause I love working with students.
Elliot Felix: That'd be fine.
Antwon Foreman: Even on the student side, working with students and actually building it so they're feeding off each other even within the launch pad has honestly been one of the funnest ecosystems I've been able to build. Where you have one student who's a marketing consultant, and they're building their business in that area. Another one might be doing branding and social media design. To give you an example, I remember a student came into my launch pad with no idea, no business, nothing. They just wandered in one day, and I'm in the back working on some things, and they were talking to some of their peers, just inviting themselves in the room, which happens often, I love when it does, and they start talking about their gifts, their strengths. And all the actual entrepreneurs in the room came together and was like "if you're already spending money on this, why are you not making money off of it?" And each of them started guiding that student from their respective area in the things that they were growing within themselves. By the end of probably like a two-hour period, they had helped that student build a business model, start their social media page. They were orchestrating it with each other, but also saying, "Hey, here's how I can feed into your business. Here's literally how, you can help us once you grow." And that dynamic of them both feeding off each other and growing together is really a beautiful example of kind of ecosystem design and architecture, where they understand they need support though, of course, they're looking to grow themselves.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. And I would imagine that train the trainer model or you're helping students who in turn will help others is really fulfilling. I'd love to hear like how do you define student success?
Antwon Foreman: I still view higher ed honestly as a business, and the students as the customer. And the only way you get customer success, just like student success, is if those students or that customer get what they expect when they leave you. So I think student success is less about career readiness and more about them actually stepping into that career, being positioned into that posi- career, and walking.
Elliot Felix: Be ready, do, actually do it.
Antwon Foreman: Yep, don't be ready really do.
Elliot Felix: Yeah.
Antwon Foreman: And my goal for a lot of students coming through my program and overall that I engage with, I tell them, "I want you to have three things walking into your senior year. I want you to have a job offer. I want you to have a graduate school offer or be working on it and I want you to have a revenue-generating business. And I want you to pick two out of those three things over the course of your senior year that you wanna do in the long term." It's a lofty goal to some and an aggressive one, but I think when we truly realize that student success is the aftermath and outcome of student development and student activation, and if we develop those first two things, they're already pre-prepared for us to be able to really position them in the ecosystem.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, just actually helping students d-do the thing, not just be ready for the thing, I think is such a powerful shift in in perspective. And when you're having, real conversations with real clients, real customers, solving real problems, it just, it raises the stakes, it accelerates the learning. Maybe it tells you're on the right path. Maybe it tells you wanna go in a totally different direction. But I really I really appreciate that.
Noah Brown: Thanks. I'm Noah Brown, currently serving as a senior advisor for workforce for Ellucian. Prior to—Thank you... joining with Ellucian, I was a senior advisor at the US Department of Education, and prior to that, a past president and CEO of the Association of Community College Trustees. So I allegedly know some things about pathways, workforce development, and the nexus between higher ed and employment.
Antwon Foreman: Hello, everybody. My name is Antwon Foreman. I originally owned a consulting company. We had focused on entrepreneurship consulting, scaling, ecosystem building. Now I juggle that with actually teaching innovation entrepreneurship and being a director over an entrepreneurship center at North Carolina A&T State University. The center actually engages six thousand out of fifteen thousand students on campus, three thousand students from other campuses. We've collectively helped seventy-two student businesses make seven point eight million in revenue in the last three years and positioned about six hundred students into six-figure positions at graduation in the past three years. So I do a lot of experiential learning and bridging that with the in-class extracurricular activities to make sure that students are actually ready for the workforce and not just educated about the workforce.
Rupa Saran: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our exciting session here. My name is Rupa Saran. I'm the Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Technology Officer for the Coast Community College District in Southern California. Our district is comprised of three colleges, and we serve about close to 50,000 students. And I also lead our California Community Colleges system-wide initiative. So I'm not sure if you're aware, we're the biggest system in community colleges in the nation. We serve about 2.2 million students. So one of the initiatives that I'm leading for our system is called Common Cloud Data Platform. And bottom line is we wanna bring everyone's data, standardize it, and let's not do it 116 times, because that's the number of colleges we have. And we'll talk about it more and more during our discussion. And I also just finished the term for board president for Chief Information Systems Officers Association. Again, there are 73 districts, so there are 73 CTOs, so we collaborate, we share ideas, and what can we do to help all of our colleagues and, ideas and things like that. So with that, I'll pass it on to my colleague here.
Norman Palmer: Thank you so much. My name is Norman Palmer. I am the Director of Technology and Innovation at Complete College America. But prior to coming to Complete College America, I have a pretty lengthy history with technology. Started out in the military, did that for about 21 years. After that, I spent some time as a director in Washington, DC for the Department of Homeland Security, running IT operations for the department. And then after that, I had the opportunity to go and work for Northrop Grumman, where I was in charge of all software development for the corporation. My last big project that I worked on was the Webb Telescope. I had five software developers on that project. After I left that, I went into consulting and did executive, and I still do a little bit of executive-level consulting. But I was privileged with the opportunity to come to Complete College America, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that really focuses on really helping all students in America get through college on time, on budget, and with a certificate or degree in their hands that will provide upward mobility in their lifetime. So I'm really glad to be here. I did a lot of work with the Gates Foundation and that's how I got engaged. My wife encouraged me to start giving back. Part of the reason why I'm even here today is I wanna give back and do some good.
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Elliot Felix: And what role, does entrepreneurship play in enabling that kind of success, right? In, in doing the thing talking to people and so forth?
Antwon Foreman: I believe if we use entrepreneurship properly, it has the ability to be a star player in that process. If we take it away from just startups and VC-backed startups and more to what entrepreneurship is at its core, and that's how do you create value? How do you communicate value? How do you position it? How do you leverage it? If I can teach students those four things, really doesn't matter if they go corporate or start a business. They're able to scale and actually contribute to the ecosystems that they're in. And by getting students into entrepreneurial projects, ecosystem projects in terms of economic development, governmental projects, and things of that nature, we can get a vast array of students from different disciplines to really be able to engage and grow and build their resume before they graduate, especially when we embed those things into the classroom. For example, with my program currently, we've been able to engage 42 different majors on campus. And to be able to do that and be able to talk with liberal arts majors and theater majors about the value of their degree and how to pull it out to contribute in a bigger array to different problems that are currently happening, whether that be social impact issues commercialization of things for organizations like the Department of Energy. We do a lot of government projects like the DoD. But for them to be able to really see how their major is used in the real world and build themselves is something that I think entrepreneurship can uniquely do compared to a lot of other methods and methods of experiential learning.
Elliot Felix: It's a great point because once you broaden the frame beyond entrepreneurship equals startup, you understand the broader i- applicability. It reminds me of the Dan Pink book, "To Sell Is Human," he talks about he talks about there's this narrow definition of sales w- like used car salesman, whatever it might be. But i- his argument is everyone is involved what he calls non-sales selling. We're all trying to g- convince people of an idea. We're trying to get people behind it, whatever it might be. So it's the communication, it's the positioning, it's the value. So I really like that broader definition. And what are some of the things students go on to do, in addition to having that revenue-generating business i- into their senior year? What are the other-- what are some of the other ways they apply it, as entrepreneurs and/or, or in other roles or other ways?
Antwon Foreman: It's been a wide array, and that's been the most exciting thing about what I've done over the last few years. I've had a student who skipped her MBA and went straight into PhD in entrepreneurship because she had that much on her res, on her resume over the course of her actually three years. She graduated with two degrees in three years, and had two businesses that were revenue generating. Others that built real estate companies, and they went and did their master's at University of Maryland with their real estate business. Some who went straight corporate and used that experience to get a higher salary. Really using entrepreneurship and experiential learning is how I've been able to get so many of those students a higher salary at graduation, because they have a year or two of experience, of full year-round experience on their resume, and not just summer internship experience. 'Cause a lot of our projects literally start in August, and we do different projects all the way throughout the year. So they've worked with companies like Thermo Fisher. Internships and positions with corporations like BMS. Even with government agencies, creating pipelines into careers within government agencies they had no idea existed. We've done a lot of projects with the Defense Innovation Unit and DOD that have allowed them to open up careers in project management allowed them to really grow themselves, even in things like procurement and buying. And many of them have walked into other more leadership roles straight out of undergrad, the ones who really started their freshman year and worked their way up, where they're lower level managers coming out of undergrad.
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Elliot Felix: And to get people to this wide variety of really amazing outcomes is there a common toolkit or process or what are the tools and methods you're using to teach these things and students to work on these kinds of projects?
Antwon Foreman: I do have a personal kind of framework and development system that I've done even before teaching at A&T, when I said that, our business has always been a social business, and really to be able to engage students and activate students in mass. So currently, even though I'm...
Elliot Felix: So it's like the support you method or...
Antwon Foreman: Basically.
Elliot Felix: Yeah.
Antwon Foreman: It is how do you...
Elliot Felix: Yeah.
Antwon Foreman: And it's how do you really frame it? When you're trying to make sure, and I always tell students, "I can't choose when you're ready." So I can't choose when you're ready to go on a project. It is their choice, their development process, and building in that self-sufficiency is a major piece, where they realize they are responsible for their own education. So there's a system I use in how to filter them from doing mass events and figuring out and analyzing their activation, to looking at when they're showing that they're ready to be on those projects. And then there's a separate dynamic of, hey, here's a curriculum and design factor where I need to teach you some core things that are universal skills. And that to me is one of the beautiful things about entrepreneurship. Like you said earlier, to me, it's a universal skill. I tell students, one of the first things I tell them once they get past tier one is, if you look in your introduction to business book in our Management 110 class, Understanding Business, one of the first things it says is, "Business is any activity in which one provides a product or a service in pursuit of profit." Which means anytime you charge someone a few dollars to take them to the store, right? If you really think about it, every job you've ever taken was in pursuit of profit. It's just that you were the product of that business, and you had to figure out that you are your first business, you're your first product, you're your first investment. And I need to get you to approach your life that way because if you do not do that, your life will tend to fail 90-plus percent of businesses fail. And that is a personal choice on how we use our time. And I walk them through this development process and kind of exposure process where they're exposed to theories, core skill sets, but also interpersonal skills to be able to grow through that process.
Elliot Felix: Do you think with the gig economy and, Fiverr and eBay and all these platforms you think that's made entrepreneurship more accessible to this generation of students? Or is it ab- there's probably less paper routes, but there's more there's more there's more Fiverr. Where do you think that shakes out?
Antwon Foreman: I think it has definitely made entrepreneurship more successful and accessible. And I say successful, it came out almost naturally because it decreased so many barriers to get into it, where you didn't need as much startup costs, things like that. People could dabble in it to figure out what fit them best. I'm talking to one R1 institution now about the gig economy and how it can be used in the classroom. And I think it's the most underutilized act, like tool in higher education because it's built-in examples, built-in things or reference that connect with that student. If you know who's in that economy and who's not, and that's whether or not they're driving Uber and DoorDash, or whether or not they are selling products online in drop shipping, or they're, trying to get brand deals on social media. They're engaging in entrepreneurship and business no matter their major at this point. And honestly I was doing a presentation actually in Cleveland a few months ago about AI entrepreneurship and how it can be equity bridge or equity nuke in many ways. And a large part of that conversation as well was that this current generation of students have seen an interesting aftermath and series of events that they're not trusting traditional routes as much as we used to, where many of them have watched their grandparents work a job for 30 or 40 years, but they're still needing help possibly with medication and things of that nature. Their parents go through work, and I have students who openly tell me, "My parents weren't there as much just because they were working, and I want more work-life balance watching them work and never take a vacation." The millennial generation I often say is like a rebirth of the silent generation. They've been through so much stuff in their lifetime, going from 9/11 all the way up, that many of them are like, "I just want a peaceful life." And, but they've talked to their siblings, their cousins about student loan debt and all these other things that are burdens to them doing things even down to having kids and getting married, right? And I think this youngest generation now that's in college has seen all of this and they're like, "Hey, I gotta keep my options open."
Elliot Felix: Yeah, let me create the job I want as opposed to put all my time and effort into f- into finding something that may not even exist or may not-- I may not even trust or security in.
Noah Brown: I'm gonna add on to that. The first thing is we have to realize we don't own the monopoly. There are lots of players in this world. There are for-profit providers, there are third-party certifiers, there are industry, there are labor unions, and on. I heard just recently that we now have 1.5 million industry-validated certificates. None of those were created in higher education. They were all created externally. So that kind of begs the question as I move around the country and talk to presidents and look at programs and talk to employers, it begs the question, which was actually raised in the presidents panel this morning, are the programs that we currently have even relevant to where the world of work is and where it's moving very quickly? Related to that I hear a lot from higher education leaders and others that they don't necessarily know what the skill sets are that employers are looking for. And in fact, having talked to a few employers, they can't tell me exactly what the skill sets are that they're looking for. That's a challenge, isn't it? So when I was working in the Department of Education one of the things that was handed to me was thinking about all the infrastructure investments that the then administration was making. And so I talked to a lot of colleges about this. I'll give you one example. If you're looking at electric vehicles—there are a lot of colleges in southeastern Michigan, which is where I grew up, that would love to really up their game on EV production repair and troubleshooting and so forth. If they talk to GM, Ford, or Stellantis and say, "Hey, can we get one of your cars so that the students can work on it?" The answer is no, you cannot, because it's full of proprietary software, and the last thing we're gonna let happen is a bunch of young, eager students to start tearing into this and putting it out on social media or TikTok or whatever. I'm not a social media guy, so I may be dating myself. Okay, forget TikTok. So one of the things we started talking about, which I think is a model and some of you may be pursuing, is, okay, fine. How about we do this? And I think some of those colleges are now working in this area. Let's do this. Let us have you bring the faculty and the students to the shop floor, go inside the four walls, look at the stuff, learn the stuff, sign NDAs, whatever it is has to happen, train those students up so they get a real industry-verified certificate, and then hire them at the end. That way, the students are getting the skills, they have access to the technology, they're earning a real industry-verified credential, and they get a job, which last time I checked is, I think, what all of you would like to see your students get at the end of the day.
Antwon Foreman: I probably should preface this before I go deeper into it. I teach—entrepreneurship innovation, but I do it differently than most institutions do. Most institutions use a VC-based model where they basically talk about how to legalize the business, how to get funding, and the curriculum is wrapped around that. The way I teach entrepreneurship innovation is I teach them how to create value systemically. If I can teach them how to create value, communicate value, position value, and leverage value, it doesn't matter if they go corporate or they work for themselves—they know how to navigate the ecosystem. And another huge piece about being an entrepreneurial mind in that way is you tend to look at what you can control, not what you can't. And I think JSON—oftentimes we look at the curriculum factor, and we know how long it takes to get a curriculum through higher ed. But we overlook the ability to position these things into assignments within the current curriculum and in their extracurriculars. Yeah. Everything I do in my center is completely extracurricular. So when I say we engage 6,000 students in some way, shape, or form on our campus, that's completely through extracurricular, non-engaging directly with the curriculum for the most part. The way I've been able to change the curriculum development actually is bringing faculty and bringing employers into the extracurricular activities, having them engage, and then the light bulb goes off naturally within them that they want these activities in their classroom, and then partnering with them to actually go through that process. As someone who is not high on the academic totem pole—I've been able to navigate that through that influence to actually start doing curriculum changes. We currently have six different degree paths right now just in the business school that they're looking to revamp because of the things we're doing in the center. They were a bunch of extracurricular activities, and now they wanna ingrain so every student has access, whether that is Mindset Master Classes, whether that is hands-on experiential learning, whether it's DoD projects and governmental projects that we do, or whether it's pipelines into our study abroad programs and other programs that we have. I think we overlook the ability to do bottom-up leadership—as we wait for top-down leadership.
Norman Palmer: Something that, that really interests me in this space I haven't been here long, I've been here for about six months now but something that I often reflect on are the durable skills that need to be acquired by students in general in order for those skills to be transferable in the workforce. So my undergrad is in philosophy. I'm a Morehouse grad, and one of the things that I always refer back to are the formal rules of logic when it comes to implementation of any type of curricula. And that, that's... I think that's fundamental to anything that we're driving towards is driving towards some form of truth, right? So modus tollens, modus ponens, fallacy of asserting the consequent, the circular argument, those types of things when we think about higher education and their application. We at CCA, we have a program that we're currently running, it's called the AI Readiness Consortium, and we're doing it in partnership with the Axom Collaborative in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So we do a lot of work with Harvard and MIT on this subject. And currently, we have five consortia that we're working with. We're working with CUNY Tri-C out of Cleveland, we have Pikes Peak Community College Colleges I believe they're here in Denver. And then we also are working with Metro Atlanta the Metro State Community Colleges in Atlanta, but I'm saying all that to say that we have found ways to partner with both private industry and directly with community colleges to work directly with those companies that are doing the hiring. So they're working directly with the community colleges using an AI-based platform to connect, as you stated, need, and business value. So institutions of higher learning are gonna have to rethink some of that. I think that the pedagogical shifts towards those durable skills are gonna be fundamental and foundational as we look forward and we really start implementing artificial intelligence capabilities into institutions of higher learning. And there's so much more that we're gonna discuss today, but I think that's some of the foundation.
Elliot Felix: So we've just heard about these examples of alignment in action, and I think a great place to go next, if for no other reason than that's the next question we have prepared is to understand the role of data and technology in creating and sustaining that alignment. So I'd love to hear from our panel the ways you're using data and technology to make all the great things you mentioned happen.
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Antwon Foreman: That I could be furloughed from, and I need some kind of backup to make sure that I'm, one, actually getting paid, but also that I'm actually enjoying life. And I think that's a whole different way we can connect to students by creating those pathways and showing them how all the majors on many campuses can contribute to that. I often tell my entrepreneurship students on the first day of class, "If you cannot sell the knowledge that I'm giving you, then I did not give you the right information and knowledge, and you need a refund." If you can't learn something in this class that you can go out and resale. And when you look at higher ed from that dynamic of the professor giving value, that the student is expected to also give value in that classroom through their own experiences and contributing to that dialogue and conversation. And again, this ecosystem of value being created, it shifts, and I think the gig economy is just a very low barrier of entry to get back into that.
Elliot Felix: It's interesting. It's a curious mix of less trust and security, but at the same time lower and more platforms. And hopefully they cancel each other out so that there's, there's prosperity and students can thrive into the future. I would love to get your take on the future we wrap up here. What's changing about the role that entrepreneurship might play in student success, and how can colleges and their corporate partners adapt?
Antwon Foreman: I think one of the roles is, or what's changing about it, is being more accessible. Originally, a core portion of entrepreneurship was, how do I have the idea, come up with that genius thing to fill that gap, and then how do I align myself with the resources and network, and really consolidate resources I don't have access to, to be able to grow this business? And with things like the gig economy just how the world is changing, with AI as a prime example, you don't need as many resources. It's really about those personal skills, communication skills, that grit, the perseverance and willingness to learn and be a lifelong learner. And that is changing everything that we're seeing right now. And even when I talk to a lot of corporate partners and corporations in general, I realize it's interesting because they describe entrepreneurial students and students with entrepreneurial mindsets, sometimes without even saying the word, almost like they want it, but don't really wanna say that word right now. And, but I think...
Elliot Felix: Self-starters. We want go-getters, right? We want people who are driven. Who are comfortable with ambiguity.
Antwon Foreman: We want highly adaptive students.
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Elliot Felix: Sounds like an entrepreneur, yeah.
Antwon Foreman: And I think in that though, I think in this new age, especially with AI and technology, we have to become comfortable saying the word and knowing that is what we're describing and that's what we want. And that everyone with the entrepreneurial mindset, sometimes they don't wanna work for themselves. Sometimes they want the security of an organization and want to build things as an entrepreneur within the organization. And one major thing I talk about with corporate partners or with now when it comes to hiring is, do you want the employee that is gonna do their job, not figure out what's wrong, never raise a problem, not see a gap, and just consistently do the same thing, whether it's efficient or not? Or do you want the employee who's every day thinking about their job, how to bring the most value, how to be the best, treating that job like it's their own business, but also willing to say, "Hey, I realize there's a issue here. I realize that there's some way we can do this better," and that has not only the courage to bring that up, but they know how to systemically bring up those things in proposal format and execute on those things, and bring people together to be able to solve those problems. And I think for us to be able to survive even as a country as we grow, in terms of innovation and AI, we really need everyone to have that entrepreneurial mindset and that willingness to contribute and bring their best self to the table and grow everything that they touch, and that's really the core of entrepreneurship as a whole.
Elliot Felix: That's so inspiring, and I think a great place to end today's conversation. And really appreciate all the amazing work you're doing both in higher ed and through through Support U, and wishing you all the best on your many entrepreneurial endeavors into the future.
Antwon Foreman: I appreciate it and appreciate being here and just sharing, and sharing all the things entrepreneurship can do. If you ever need me back, just let me know, and I'm more than willing to expand on things.
Elliot Felix: Awesome. And if people wanna hear more, you're actually in in a recent podcast episode where we had our conversation at Elive, that's episode 116, so people can get more more Antwon there as well as a bunch of other great folks on the panel. So thanks so much.
Antwon Foreman: No problem. And if they wanna reach out too they can easily reach me at support-u.org.
Elliot Felix: There you go. Sir.
Antwon Foreman: Thank you.
Elliot Felix: Thanks for listening to the Connected College podcast. Go to Elliot felix.com for more information about my book, the Connected College articles I've written and talks I've given. There's also tools you can download information on upcoming events and information on booking me to speak at your institution or organization. Please support the podcast by rating it and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where all students succeed.