American colleges and universities are feeling the entrepreneurial spirit. The number of formal programs (majors, minors, certificates) in entrepreneurship is well over 500, quintupled in the past thirty years according to a Kauffman Foundation report. Entrepreneurship courses for students and faculty numbers top 5,000, taught on more than 2,500 campuses — up from only 250 courses in 1975. In 2013, roughly 400,000 US students took courses related to entrepreneurship taught by 9,000 different faculty members.

The following year nearly a quarter of all incoming college freshmen declared they “wanted to be entrepreneurs” of some kind. Meanwhile, faculty hiring and tenure decisions at research universities are increasingly based on professors’ entrepreneurial ability to generate revenue streams.

Zeal for entrepreneurialism is growing. Yet the number of new business start-ups per capita in the US has steadily declined over the last thirty years, and the US ranks twelfth in global start-up activity, according to Gallup and the US Census Bureau. So what exactly are these programs preparing students and faculty to do?