Students can’t choose futures they’re unable to see

Comment: The moment a student starts building something, the university changes: a lecture becomes a source of answers to an immediate problem; an assignment might become a prototype; a classmate is no longer just someone nearby, but a potential collaborator, technical expert, or co-founder; and a chance conversation could lead to a mentor or an early customer.

The university itself has not changed, of course. What has changed is what the student notices.

That’s the power of entrepreneurial identity: the belief that ‘a person like me’ can act on ideas and create value. It shapes how students use their education, who they connect with and whether they see themselves as people who can make things happen.

Universities do more than prepare students for careers. They also teach students which careers are imaginable.

Young people form their aspirations from the professions and people they can see. Research commissioned by the Tertiary Education Commission found that 52 percent of New Zealand children aspired to one of the nine most popular occupations. The issue was not a lack of ambition, but limited exposure to the range of futures available to them.

Universities can widen that view, but they also reinforce familiar pathways. Students can readily imagine becoming engineers, lawyers, health professionals, researchers, consultants or employees of established organisations. Those futures are embedded in degree structures, professional accreditation and graduate recruitment.

Entrepreneurship is less visible. It may appear to be only an extracurricular activity, a business school subject, or something pursued by a small group of unusually confident people. When it sits at the edge of university life, students may struggle to see it as relevant to them.

One sign of this identity gap is how few New Zealand students currently imagine founding a venture as part of their future.

The 2025 Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey drew on 4,154 responses from three New Zealand universities. Only 6.5 percent of respondents intended to become founders immediately after study, compared with 15.6 percent internationally. Five years after graduation, New Zealand founder intention rose to 20.7 percent but remained below the international benchmark of 28.5 percent.

Students here also have less exposure to entrepreneurship education. More than 83 percent of the New Zealand respondents had not taken an entrepreneurship course, compared with 57 percent internationally. Only 24 percent had participated in an extracurricular innovation or entrepreneurship activity at university.

More students deserve a genuine opportunity to discover whether entrepreneurial action could be part of their future.

When students begin exploring an idea, their studies can become more purposeful. They stop asking only, ‘What do I need to do to complete my degree?’ and begin asking, ‘How could what I am learning help me build this?’

An engineering student developing a clean-energy solution may suddenly need to understand regulation, finance and customer behaviour. A business student may realise that commercial knowledge is not enough without technical or design expertise. A creative student may see how their practice could become a sustainable enterprise. Someone who notices an unmet need in their community may begin assembling the people and resources to address it.

At the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, we see students start using the whole university differently after they access entrepreneurship education. They seek knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. They look for people with complementary capabilities. They become more willing to test assumptions, learn from evidence and move forward before all the answers are known.

Their education matters more, not less, because it now has an immediate purpose.

These capabilities remain valuable for students who never launch a start-up. Careers are becoming less linear. A graduate’s working life may move between employment, independent projects, small business, contracting, venture creation and innovation within established organisations.

Across those pathways, graduates will need to recognise opportunities, work with people unlike themselves, adapt when conditions change and create value with limited resources. In a less predictable labour market, they benefit from being able to create opportunities as well as apply for them.

Universities need to make entrepreneurial futures visible, credible and accessible.

A degree should give graduates more than the ability to do a job that already exists. It should give them the confidence to imagine a role, create an opportunity and build something that did not exist before.

New Zealand cannot afford to graduate talented people who know how to solve problems but still see acting on them as someone else’s job.