State of the Discipline
As a response to poor student outcomes in the arts,
colleges and universities have been offering career-based
courses and services for decades. However, in recent years
this concern has gained national attention. Today,
Entrepreneurship education in the fine arts is the most
dynamic and exciting trend to appear in recent memory.
The discipline itself is in a shaping process. Given the
suffix - "entrepreneurship" - much of the curricular
content and thrust is drawn from the business school.
Accounting, management, organizational principles and New
Venture Creation (NVC) are weighted heavily in many Arts
Entrepreneurship efforts. Yet in the past decade, new ideas
about the nature of entrepreneurship and arts higher
education have begun to broaden the curriculum.
Arts administrators are wrestling with a number of issues
in this context. Questions of curricular design are perhaps
the most obvious. Yet as the financial realties of higher
education funding collide with a sense of moral duty to the
students they nurture for four or more years, decision
makers are increasingly looking for the most effective
method to a "successful student outcome" and the benefits
institutions may enjoy thereafter.
The following pages available describe the state of the
discipline and the pressures that NVC is experiencing in
Arts Entrepreneurship curricula.
