| August 19, 2008 |
by Sam Adams |
Madison's Social Entrepreneur
In my last entry, I joked with you about mandatory lifestyle choices and recreational activities vital to achieve the status of "legit Madisonian." Now I'd like to tackle an arguably more important topic: Madison's unique emphasis on social entrepreneurship.
One could claim that all entrepreneurs are a benefit to society because they help create wealth and jobs in their communities, while delivering products and services that people need. What differentiates social entrepreneurs from other self-driven business people is that their focus is not just on driving profits, but on developing solutions for today's most-challenging social problems.
As a city known for liberal ideology, academics and government, Madison boasts an impressive portfolio of companies aimed at addressing some of America's most important social issues, including:
- Advancing health care delivery through preventative medicine, therapeutic treatments and improved data management
- Tackling a need to develop alternate sources of energy to limit the environmental impact of carbon emissions
- Improving education, college access and career planning, leading to satisfied, productive employees and citizens.
Recently, a new Madison company was established to address that last social issue and improve access to higher education. I recently had the opportunity to talk with Darin Eich, co-founder of ThroughCollege. Darin is truly a legit business leader who started his mission-driven organization to solve real problems in pursuit of market-driven results.
Read below for the interview.
Why did you found ThroughCollege?
I founded ThroughCollege to help solve a problem. Our company's goal is to improve college access by helping students plan for the future and execute the college application process more effectively.
Currently, there are a few big problems with the status quo of college guidance:
- Most high schools have very few guidance counselors for each student in their schools. The national average is about 400 to 1 and most guidance counselors spend only about a third of their time on admissions counseling.
- About 50% of 18 to 22 year olds attend college. Many students academically qualified for college do not submit even one college application.
- Only about 50% of students, who apply, are accepted and attend college, do not complete a bachelor's degree within five years.
So, you can see there is significant opportunity for improvement in the number of students who successfully apply and in the number of students who complete persevere and complete their degrees.
How does ThroughCollege plan to solve the problems that you've identified?
ThroughCollege helps solve these problems by providing a comprehensive series of activities that students use to prepare for, get accepted to and ultimately graduate from college. Our tagline at ThroughCollege is "The best way in is through." Our system incorporates the college application process into the essential, longer-term process of preparing for college graduation. It is accessible on-demand and is broken into manageable steps, allowing for entire schools or districts to allow their students and families to use the system.
Do you consider yourself to be a social entrepreneur?
It always has been hard for me to describe what I do but that sounds appropriate. I also consider myself an entrepreneurial educator. For me, it is important to take the knowledge and experience I have – which is generally around education, especially program development, learning, innovation and leadership – and create new innovative approaches. These are usually reflected through a program or an organization like ThroughCollege. I think an important question to ask is "entrepreneurship for what?" I believe you should be doing it for purposes that benefit society and individuals. It should add more than an economic value. We hope that people should learn and develop as a result to what we are providing.
What are some of the challenges that you've faced as a social entrepreneur?
I like to work from coffee shops, home and the Memorial Union Terrace every week but it gets old being by yourself in front of a computer. Most entrepreneurs that I know work this way. The freedom is great but many of us also miss being a part of a larger organization or group you see each day in an office.
Also funding can be a challenge. Many social entrepreneurs have a hard time funding important projects and definitely earn less than they could in other jobs – sometimes going for months without earning much at all. One may not get rich by practicing social entrepreneurship, but having the opportunity to create something of value in an area of your strengths, values and interests feels more like a calling than a job. This is worth a lot to me.
For more information, check out www.throughcollege.com.
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