Student entrepreneurs earning $$$ and degrees
By Julie Sturgeon • Bankrate.com

Since fall 2000, lucky students chosen to live in the University of Maryland's Hinman dorm have had everything they need to start a legitimate business.

Sponsors pledged $2.5 million for a state-of-the-art wireless building where up to 100 students can roam the halls with their laptops, and where they have access to a computer lab featuring expensive business software as well as a conference room complete with cherry table and leather chairs. Once a week, professionals ranging from lawyers to venture capitalists visit to share their experiences and lend a helping hand.

But other college kids are learning they don't need such trappings to create wealth -- or at least earn enough to pay their tuition. There's Syracuse University's Brian Bushell, who hated his dorm room bed enough to create a Memory Foam mattress topper and sell it to friends. Andy Szatko attends classes at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and runs a landscaping company, started with a 1989 Ford truck and a few hand tools. Today he needs to hire employees to keep up with demand.

Twins Andy and Chad Baker hit the Indiana University campus rarin' to make ends meet by producing coupon cards, an advertising tool for local merchants. Jennifer Nies earned her way through St. Cloud State University in Minnesota by running an aquarium service that involved everything from maintenance to growing her own coral reefs for these tanks.

Despite these success stories, the actual number of students choosing to become boss rather than wage earner remains nebulous.

"Nobody knows what's going on with business starts among college students," says Sharon K. Bower, director of the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards at St. Louis University. "In my opinion, a lot of kids who run small businesses in college aren't legitimate. They aren't registered, tax-paying entities. It's about cutting hair in the dorm rooms."

According to Karen Thornton, program director of Maryland's Hinman CEOs, roughly a third of the current 89 students whose business ideas earned them the right to live in her dorm are pursuing engineering degrees, another third are business majors and the remaining third cover everything from English to criminology majors.

Officials turn away twice as many students as they can admit.

"These kids come up with business ideas all the time, and we'll send them off to do market research: Does it solve a pain, will people buy at this price?" she says. "What's wonderful is that it's not just business students learning to ask these questions. It's the government and political science students, too."

Timing Is Right
"Starting your own business carries more social acceptance these days," notes Gen Tanabe, author of "1001 Ways to Pay for College" and founder of supercollege.com. Sexy stories like those of Yahoo's David Filo and Jerry Yang mean "your roommates don't look at you as the weirdo kid who doesn't have a grasp on reality," he adds.

And, in the last 20 years, entrepreneurship courses and clubs have popped up on campuses. In fact, there are more endowed entrepreneurship chairs than people to fill them, says Bower. The Internet, laptop computers and cell phones broke down the barriers that held back previous generations.

Most college businesses fall into five popular categories: