I’m Glad I Met You: Ageism Interventions in an Entrepreneurship Course

Abstract

It is important that students across university disciplines and class years explore their attitudes about ageism, aging, and older adults. Yet few if any ageism interventions in academic settings are directed at business students, instead targeting disciplines such as health sciences. In this paper we offer requisite detail of ageism workshops we developed for use in an undergraduate entrepreneurship course, including discussion of our results. Business curricula at the university level can serve to reinforce age gaps through the study of functional areas such as marketing (target market segmentation) and finance (retirement planning). In entrepreneurship, stories of youthful startups persist despite recent findings that strongly reject the notion that youth is a key trait of successful entrepreneurs. In the context of workplace ageism, ageism interventions, and age in entrepreneurship, we modified the Disrupt Aging curriculum offered by A.A.R.P., which facilitates an examination of one’s personal attitude about age and aging. Our twist was to focus the curriculum on entrepreneurship and have our students work in groups with an entrepreneur from the Baby Boom generation. This innovation to our curriculum provides promising evidence of effectiveness as measured in pre- and post-workshop attitudes about ageism and entrepreneurship.