Reimagining High School, One Shift at a Time
What happens when students get access to more than just a 3-D printer.
We build high schools around an assumption: that the job is to prepare students for university, and that preparation is predominantly a cognitive exercise — content mastered, tests passed, transcripts polished. It works, in its way: Students get into good schools. But it optimizes for only a narrow slice of what a person is capable of, leaving the rest — judgment, initiative, collaboration, problem-solving, and the ability to build something real and be accountable for it — mostly untouched until adulthood.
This article begins an occasional new series in this space about what happens when we stop underestimating high schoolers and start building experiences that treat them as capable of real work, real risk, and real contribution — not someday, but now. Each post explores one idea for reimagining the high school experience; not a wholesale rewrite of the system, but a shift in what students are trusted to do and how schools make room for it.
We are starting with entrepreneurship — students building and running real ventures, with real customers and real consequences — because it may be the clearest test case. If a sixteen-year-old can start a business, what else have we been underestimating?
Bringing the Startup Track to High School
A student in Bahrain builds a minimum viable product with a teammate she’s never met in person, guided by a mentor who worked at McKinsey. An independent school student in Salt Lake City spends two weeks living in a dorm above a makerspace, laser-cutting a prototype before pitching it to strangers on demo day. Another independent school student spends a semester preparing a pitch deck for a $30,000 statewide competition run by a major university business school. None of these students had yet graduated from high school. All three are part of the same shift: moving entrepreneurship education out of the business-club bake sale and into something closer to a real venture pipeline, often with a university’s name attached.
Because nearly every strategic plan we see includes something about “real-world learning” or “increasing the opportunities available to students on and off campus,” we think the growing number of entrepreneurship programs in public and private high schools is a model worth considering.
Two Different Bets on the Same Idea
Young Founders Lab is one of the best-known entrepreneurship education models. It’s a virtual incubator, not a school or campus program, designed for ambitious high schoolers across dozens of countries. Students can join an individual track with one-on-one mentorship to launch a startup or nonprofit, a team-based summer workshop with 30 hours of live sessions, or a ten-week pitch-competition prep track for major global business plan contests. Mentors come from Harvard Business School, Google, and McKinsey. Tuition ranges from $3,490 to $3,990, depending on the track, with need-based aid available. YFL leans heavily on outcomes, citing a self-reported alumni survey that claims its graduates are four times more likely to attend an Ivy League school or Stanford.
The other model brings the university into the loop. The Lassonde Startup Academy at the University of Utah, launching its first cohort in June 2026, is a two-week residential program for students ages 14 to 18. They live on the upper floors of Lassonde Studios, a five-story residence built over a 20,000-square-foot makerspace stocked with 3D printers, laser cutters, and sewing machines. They spend their days in workshops, mentor sessions, and pitch practice before a public demo day. The program runs through the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute, ranked among the top ten university entrepreneurship programs in the country by both U.S. News & World Report and Princeton Review, and students can earn college credit. As Anne Bastien, the academy’s director, told the university magazine, the goal is to give students “a firsthand look at every step in the startup process, from ideation and prototyping to marketing and sales.” The regular program cost for summer 2026 is $4,860, with scholarships available based on merit and need.
Lassonde also runs a second, less costly high school vehicle alongside the residential academy: the Tim Draper High School Utah Entrepreneur Challenge, an open pitch competition for any Utah high schooler, sponsored by venture capitalist Tim Draper, that awards $30,000 in cash and scholarships to student teams. It’s free to enter and doesn’t require setting foot on the university campus until the final showcase. Between the two options, the institute has effectively built both a premium, immersive product and a low-cost, high-reach one, which is instructive for any school trying to figure out what a partnership with a university could look like.
Lassonde Isn’t Alone
Once you start looking, university-housed pre-college entrepreneurship programs turn out to be a fairly crowded field. Babson College, long ranked the number one undergraduate program for entrepreneurship in the country, runs the Arthur M. Blank School Summer Program, with dozens of one- and two-week courses for rising juniors and seniors, covering everything from a “Startup Sprint” build-and-launch course to finance for entrepreneurs, taught in Babson’s Weissman Foundry prototyping space. Tufts runs an Entrepreneurship & Innovation Bootcamp through its Derby Entrepreneurship Center. USC, Northeastern, Georgetown, Seton Hall, and the University of St. Thomas’s Schulze School of Entrepreneurship all have their own versions. Internationally, programs like the Iacocca Global Entrepreneurship Intensive at Lehigh draw students from international and independent schools specifically for the cross-border cohort experience.
The common thread isn’t the curriculum, which tends to cover the same elements everywhere: design thinking, customer discovery, prototyping, and pitching. It’s the university’s name and infrastructure that lend credibility. A high school entrepreneurship club can teach the Lean Canvas. A program housed within a top-ranked business school can place a student in a real makerspace, connect them with faculty who advise actual startups, and often award college credit and a badge on their transcript. That is the pitch for independent and international schools that are building out signature programs or seeking a partner, rather than building one from scratch.
What About the Outcomes?
There is good research behind the claim that entrepreneurship education works. Darden School professor Saras Sarasvathy, along with coauthors at Aalborg University and the University of Toronto, studied Denmark’s 2005 reform requiring entrepreneurship instruction in business and technical secondary schools. The relative effect was large: a 40% increase in the likelihood that graduates launched a revenue-generating company within three years, though the absolute increase was modest (from roughly 1% to 1.4% of students). Two findings stand out. First, the benefit appeared only in schools that taught practical business skills, such as finance and sales, not in schools that focused solely on building entrepreneurial confidence. Second, students without entrepreneurial parents still benefited, though less than those with entrepreneurial parents, suggesting that school-based programs can partially substitute for the role models some students already have at home.
Denmark’s experiment was a mandatory, national, in-school curriculum that reached every student in the affected schools. What’s described above, whether it’s a $4,860 residential program at a university or a $3,990 virtual incubator, is voluntary and largely serves a self-selected group of students whose families can already afford enrichment (though financial aid is sometimes available). The Danish study is evidence that structured entrepreneurship education has real effects on career trajectories. There is no evidence that a two-week summer program yields the same effect, and it’s worth treating the college-admissions-boosting claims with caution until better third-party outcome data are available.
None of that is an argument against the concept. A student who spends two weeks living above a makerspace at a top-ranked business school, or is matched with a Harvard Business School mentor for three months, is very likely to gain something durable: experience with ambiguity, a sense of what building something real requires, and exposure to people and places they wouldn’t otherwise encounter. For schools deciding whether to build a program in-house or partner with a university willing to open its doors, both models probably have a role. A university partnership brings infrastructure and legitimacy that are hard to replicate within a single high school. An in-house program, done well, can reach far more students than any paid summer intensive ever will. The programs worth watching are those, like Lassonde’s pairing of a residential academy with a free open competition, that try to do both at once.