The traditional career path of long-term employment for a single corporate giant has become less appealing to a new generation of graduates, as starting and running a small business has become more desirable. In fact, small business is generating about 75 percent of all new jobs in this country, according to a report in 2006 from the Small Business Administration.

“What you have today are people who have to think about their careers in a way you didn’t before,” said Tom Tremblay, president and chief executive of the Guardair Corporation, a small manufacturer in Chicopee, Mass. “So it’s essential that people learn how to manage and run and participate in small companies. Small business can be taught, and it needs to be taught.”

Marjorie Smelstor, the Kauffman Foundation’s vice president for the Kauffman Campuses Initiative and Higher Education Program, agreed that small business can be taught. The Kauffman Foundation is spending $50 million to finance such programs at 19 universities, including Arizona State, Oberlin, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Rochester.

“The bigger question is, How is it taught?” Ms. Smelstor said. “If it is taught purely in a traditional classroom with lectures and talking heads with an emphasis on a theoretical approach, then no, it won’t be taught or learned.” If however, there is a formal connection between classroom learning and hands-on extracurricular activity like actually starting a business, then the concept thrives, she said.

Many colleges have turned to active or retired business owners rather than academics to teach the courses. At C. T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston, for example, Daniel Steppe, a 66-year-old multimillionaire, is director of the Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship. Mr. Steppe spent 37 years in business, started five successful companies from scratch and, after selling his last start-up in 2001, decided to forgo golf for academia.

“Our classes are taught by a group of men and women who spent 20 to 30 years in the entrepreneurial world,” Mr. Steppe said. “We have some theory but our focus is on the practical. We don’t go through all the physics and formulas on how the bicycle works. We just get on and ride it.”

Increasingly, the schools are seeking better frameworks and processes to ensure that the pedagogy is replicable and measurable. And some, like Ms. Smelstor of the Kauffman Foundation, emphasize the continued importance of a strong liberal arts education as a foundation for successful programs. “We think entrepreneurship in business schools is often too narrowly focused,” she said.