Top 5 Entrepreneurship Programs for High School Students

May 19, 2020

Entrepreneurship is like art: you’re never too young to start and you’re never too old to improve.

For high school students, entrepreneurship is a great way to discover what you like to work on, to identify and solve important problems in your community, and to connect with new people. There are a number of ways high school students can learn how to be entrepreneurs, ranging from conventional classroom experiences to joining clubs to intensive training programs. Here are five of the best programs out there today.

1. FBLA/DECA:

FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America) and DECA are national organizations with local chapters at high schools throughout the country. If you don’t have one at your high school, you can create one relatively easily. At the chapter level, they operate like most other high school clubs, with executive officers, weekly meetings, and other typical high school club fare.

The value of FBLA and DECA comes from their regional conferences and competitions. Students get a chance to meet and network with other FBLA/DECA members outside their schools, counties, or states. At competitions, students face off in a range of academic and business-related tasks — including web development, accounting, and graphic design — for cash prizes.

2. Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE)

NFTE (Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship) is a non-profit organization that provides entrepreneurship classes to students in low-income schools. NFTE’s model is to train local teachers to teach NFTE’s entrepreneurial curriculum at the schools where they already operate. This system ensures that students are learning from experienced teachers with roots in their community. However, the teachers may have no business or entrepreneurial background themselves.

NFTE offers several courses for high school students and culminates in a business plan competition. One of NFTE’s strengths is that because it reaches so many students, the strength of its alumni network will continue to grow.

3. Management and Technology Summer Institute (M&TSI)

M&TSI is a summer program held at the University of Pennsylvania for rising high school juniors and seniors. Participants are placed in groups and for the duration of the 3-week program, they develop their business idea and their pitch. The program includes faculty from Penn Engineering and the Wharton School and a range of guest lecturers and company visits.

This program costs $7,500 and includes lodging and meals on the Penn campus and access to events in Philadelphia.

4. Launch X

Launch X has migrated online this summer, where it’ll be a 6-week program for rising high school juniors and seniors. Launch X was originally created at MIT, where it previously offered an on-campus program. Like M&TSI, Launch X puts students in groups and provides resources to help them build a product and a presentation over the duration of the program.

The program fee for the on-campus program is typically around $8,000. This year, the online program is $5,450.

5. Future Entrepreneur Challenge (FEC)

The Future Entrepreneur Challenge is a 4-week online program available to all high schoolers. Like Launch X and M&TSI, FEC arranges students in groups and each group receives resources and training from experienced mentors that allow them to produce a product and a pitch by the end of the session. Unlike those programs, FEC also provides ongoing support to students after the program ends through advice and mentorship. The most successful groups are invited to join the FEC accelerator.

The program fee for the online program is currently $880.