Can the higher education ecosystem catch up with and support India’s student founders?

Sixty-six billion-dollar companies in the U.S. trace their roots to India-born founders. While the world continues to benefit from India’s innovators, it’s worth asking: how are we nurturing that talent at home, especially among students dreaming of building something big?

A recent report by the Campus Fund revealed that 35 out of India’s 109 unicorns were started by students during college or within three years of graduating. These young founders often see problems with fresh eyes. They’re not burdened by ‘how things have always been done.’ Instead, they imagine freely and often pursue ideas that more experienced entrepreneurs might overlook. Even so, student startups are often an exception, not the rule. They are born not out of a supportive infrastructure, but despite the lack of one. Despite more student-focused incubation programmes, entrepreneurship-embedded educational courses, and youth-centred investment funds, our mainstream education system is still designed to create ‘knowledge workers’ rather than ‘business leaders’.

What’s missing

In the past decade, top Indian academic institutions have produced around 550 startup founders. In comparison, leading global universities have launched two to three times as many. Subsequently, startups in India only contribute to 5-8% of our GDP, much lower than most developed countries. We are 39th in the Global Innovation Index. Not because Indian students lack ambition or ideas. What’s missing is the right kind of support and backing, especially in the critical early stages when there’s still peer pressure and parental pressure to seek a stable job instead of pursuing entrepreneurship.

Consider this: over the past two years, a student-focused incubation programme received nearly 800 applications from across 26 states and 150 towns. This shows that entrepreneurial energy isn’t just concentrated in big cities, it’s everywhere. However, while talent is widely distributed, opportunities are not.

Take two students: one from Mumbai and one from Jaipur. Their ideas may be equally strong, but the student from Mumbai is twice as likely to be able to access to an entrepreneurship cell or early-stage funding. Geography shouldn’t determine destiny, but, in India’s startup ecosystem, it often does.

Proximity and exposure

Beyond formal and structured support, just proximity and exposure to entrepreneurial mindsets and action matter. Academics and researchers like Prof. Saras Sarasvathy have proposed that, while our education teaches us to ‘predict the future’ (causal logic), entrepreneurs often need to ‘control the future’ (effectual logic). Entrepreneurs need to start with what they have, talk to customers, and co-create realities and even visions that did not exist before.

For instance, anyone with common sense will tell you that it’s impractical to expect people to go sleep in strangers’ houses; even more so to expect people to open up their homes to strangers. This is what our education systems reward. However, effectual or entrepreneurial thinking is when an Airbnb asks “What can I do to get people to trust strangers and share homes?” Of course, bold experiments like Airbnb, Urban Company, and Zerodha did not happen overnight. Each took lots of iterative experimentation, and resilience; not qualities that the Indian mainstream education system prepares or even exposes students to. We’re expecting innovation and risk-taking to emerge from a system that rewards perfection and risk-aversion.

Often, when successful student founders display an appetite and ability for experimentation, co-creation, and resilience, it is through their passion, willingness and courage to go against the grain and long bouts of brute force and self-sacrifice. This is neither a sustainable nor a scalable model of entrepreneurship. If we are to become a nation of builders and thinkers who lead the world with cutting-edge innovations and a resilient economy, we need to meet our student founders not just with funding and infrastructure but with more holistic education, trust, and the space to experiment and fail safely.

Lakshmi. C is Engagement Manager, and Akshay Bapte is Assistant Manager at NSRCEL.