Lord Young of Graffham told a conference that higher education had to “instil the very concept of enterprise” into young people.
“Every undergraduate during the course of their degree - and I know exactly how little people do during their undergraduate degree…should have a short course on setting up [their] own company,” he told the Student and Graduate Entrepreneurship in Colleges and Universities conference in London on 20 March.
“The world in which they [graduates] are going to go and inhabit and work in is going to be a self-employment world, it’s going to be a small firms world,” he argued.
Graduates “may have to be more self reliant…they have to embrace the concept of working for themselves”, and universities had to prepare them for this, he said.
His comments come amid debate over the extent to which universities should prepare students for work. Writes David Matthews for Times Higher Education.