企业家眼中最应该学的大学课程

It takes a diverse set of skills to be an entrepreneur. And a lot of founders wish they had learned those skills in school—instead of on the job.

Whether taking on a new role at the company or facing an unexpected downturn, entrepreneurs are constantly faced with situations they weren’t trained to handle. Looking back, many of them say the right college courses might have prepared them to navigate the tough times.

We asked several business owners what classes they wish they had taken and why. Here’s how they responded:

While attending the University of Richmond in the 1990s, Casey Halloran figured a business-administration degree would groom him for any type of corporate career. But a couple of years after graduation, he and a friend decided to start a travel agency focused on Costa Rica—and he soon discovered something missing from his skill set.

“I wish I had taken courses in deal structures, basic negotiations and how to design and write great win-win agreements,” he says. “This is something small-business owners do every day.”

He sometimes feels at a disadvantage negotiating and structuring terms for everything from agreements with travel and hospitality vendors—such as hotels and tour operators—to contracts with his employees and contract workers. Due to the financial challenges stemming from the pandemic, he’s recently had to renegotiate several major deals, including a complex restructuring of how he pays the sales force at his company, NAMU Travel Group, based in San Jose, Costa Rica. With so many travelers canceling trips in recent months, the company has changed both how much and when sales reps receive their commissions.

“When you make a mistake on this stuff, sometimes you live with it for a long time,” he says.

David Shove-Brown, co-founder of Washington, D.C., architecture firm 3877 Design, took a few general psychology electives while pursuing his architecture degree at Catholic University in the 1990s. But now that managing his firm’s 25 employees is a big part of his job, he wishes he had taken courses about how to get the best out of people and handle workplace conflicts.

While he has learned management through experience, having some academic background in managerial psychology would help him when trying to help resolve conflicts in the workplace—or head them off. “How do you move forward so you don’t just end up reliving the same problems?” he says.

Kristine Thorndyke, who got a marketing degree from Indiana University in 2013, runs an online test-prep company from China, Test Prep Nerds, and spends much of her time writing copy for her website. Now she wishes she had taken courses on the psychology of consumer-buying behaviors, so she could write copy that would lead to more clicks and ultimately more purchases. Such a class would help her “better learn what impacts decisions and how to better understand what is going on in a customer’s mind when they are browsing a website or considering buying a product,” she says.

Savannah Enright of Queens, N.Y., owns Modern Muslim Market, an online marketplace for Muslim art and home décor. She got a business degree in design and management from the Parsons School of Design in 2007 and a master’s of business administration from Baruch College in 2013, but regrets not learning how to code. She frequently needs to make website changes that require a basic knowledge of coding, such as fixing site glitches that are slowing down loading time.

“I’m constantly having to go and hire developers to fix something that is frankly quite easy, and yet I just don’t have that tool set to do myself,” she says.

Dennis Vu, co-founder and CEO of Ringblaze, an Irvine, Calif., provider of business-phone solutions, wishes he had taken a creative-writing course while getting his undergraduate degree in business administration and M.B.A. from California State University at Fullerton about eight years ago. He estimates that about half of his time is now spent writing, whether emails to users or prospective investors or blog posts. Being able to write more eloquently, concisely and persuasively would make his job easier.

“It would have helped me quite a lot with marketing, creating some of my own content and working on building my brand,” Mr. Vu says. He currently uses ghostwriters to write blog posts under his byline that he helps create, but he would like to be able to write them himself. “While it’s easier than ever to find a ghostwriter, it would be great to sit down and write my own content, share my own thoughts and have my own personal blog.”

Amal Radhakrishnan, co-founder and CEO of Parkaze, a Boston-based tech startup, got his master’s degree in computer science from Boston University in 2019. But Mr. Radhakrishnan—born and raised in India—says a communications-focused course would have helped him adapt to U.S. networking practices, so he’d be better at making small talk and mingling at networking events. “Effective networking is essential to every entrepreneur, yet it is a struggle for many of us,” he says.

Margaret Geiger, who runs public-relations agency Twelve31 Media in Little River, S.C., got a degree in her field from the University of South Carolina in 2013. But she didn’t realize entrepreneurship was in her future, so she never took business courses. Looking back, she says, a course in financial management would have helped her with budgeting, forecasting and tax issues, things she has had to teach herself along the way. “Of course, you can invest in programs like QuickBooks, but it’s good to have the overall financial-planning expertise,” she says.

Some entrepreneurs don’t think any course would have truly prepared them for running their business.

Bret Bonnet, owner of Quality Logo Products of Aurora, Ill., which sells promotional products, is one of those people. Though he graduated from North Central College, a small private college in Illinois, in 2003, he says he wishes he had skipped college altogether and just started his business right after high school. He took many business courses in college, but most of what he needed to know to grow his business came from experience.

“I really do feel that just getting into it and doing it is the best way to learn,” he says.