This post was originally published on On Deck
College marketing materials often focus on their big-name alumni, including those who have gone into leadership roles at Fortune 500 companies and international brand names.
But small businesses are the engine rooms of the American economy. Companies of under 500 employees account for 99.9% of all businesses, employing 45.9% of the population, creating the majority of new jobs and generating trillions of dollars in revenue. For most budding entrepreneurs, a school that has produced a small number of celebrity bosses should be less impressive than one that demonstrably prepares students for the realities of the entrepreneurial path and the nitty-gritty of business life — whether it’s running a family business or launching a startup.
To identify America’s small business factories, online business lender OnDeck used LinkedIn data and calculated the number of small business owners per 10,000 graduates for each of the 436 top colleges in U.S. News’ National College Rankings.
What We Did
We filtered LinkedIn data to record the total number of graduates from each of the top colleges overall and the number from each college with the current title of “owner”/”co-owner” for a company of fewer than 500 employees. Combining both values enabled us to calculate the
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