Entrepreneurship training is becoming a “survival strategy” for universities across the world, as global trends raise questions over the value of degrees.

The University of Cape Town (UCT) has adopted entrepreneurship as its fourth “mission”, in a change of tack for the 197-year-old institution. Deputy vice-chancellor Thokozani Majozi said entrepreneurial ability had become essential in a country facing existential levels of unemployment.

Majozi, who heads UCT’s research and internationalisation mission, said the unemployment rate among degree-qualified South Africans in their 20s was close to 30 per cent, up from about 20 per cent a decade ago. Although lower than the overall unemployment rate of about 40 per cent, it nevertheless meant someone with a degree stood a high chance of being “rendered irrelevant” in the economy.

“It’s not only those that are not performing well in class who struggle with employment,” Majozi told ����Vlog’s Asia Universities Summit. “Some of the best students struggle.” Even engineering degrees, once guaranteed to elicit work, have lost their lustre in a country where manufacturing has nosedived. Most employed engineering graduates now work in financial services, Majozi said.

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He said UCT’s “obsession” was to remain relevant by confronting a cultural mindset of dependence on other people’s entrepreneurialism. “A typical graduate, at least where I come from, is trained to work for someone,” Majozi told the Hong Kong summit.

“You go to university, you get a degree and then you work somewhere…for the rest of your career. We believe strongly that putting innovation and entrepreneurship at the heart of our academic project might change that. We want to create a new calibre of graduates who have in their minds the possibility of opening doors for employment, rather than being employees themselves.”

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The job market has become saturated at the very time that South Africa has dramatically increased its output of graduates, Majozi told THE. Entrepreneurialism, once the preserve of tech and business graduates, is now required of professionals like accountants, teachers and doctors. “There’s no capacity any more to absorb them.”

The university has enlisted South African industry pioneers to help reshape the curriculum, amid plans to establish an and an innovation district. Similar moves are afoot 10,000 kilometres to the north, where the University of Bristol is opening “enterprise” campuses in the city’s Temple Quarter and far away in Mumbai.

“We’re always being asked, ‘can you actually teach people to be entrepreneurs?’ The evidence says yes,” said Bristol vice-chancellor Evelyn Welch. “There is something about that sense of preparing students not just to stay on a ladder that somebody else has created for you, but to create your own ladder – not just for yourself but also for others.”

Welch said the biggest challenge for UK universities, originating in the US, had been a widespread questioning of the value of degrees. “We have to do something quite differently to make an impact,” she told the summit.

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She said the goal was to remove the walls between universities and communities so that students, staff and university leaders could understand the problems that communities wanted solved. “If we can…find those solutions, our students can sell those solutions, and that is good for everybody – including for the university’s sense of relevance and value to a wider world.”

Medical entrepreneur Denis Lo said universities had a responsibility to instruct their students in the multiple roads to success. This included teaching them to create, protect and value intellectual property (IP), he said.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, where Lo is vice-chancellor, gives staff and students the option to invest in patents stemming from their research. Lo said some postgraduates channelled half of their allowances into their IP and one of his own students, on graduation, had used the proceeds to buy an apartment.

“I think we need to instil this concept in students that it is normal to be atypical,” Lo told the summit. “It’s normal to be unconventional. If everybody’s walking in the same direction, then…the world will be a very monotonous place.”

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South Africa faces bigger problems than monotony if it cannot address graduate joblessness, with poverty and crime set to spiral, Majozi told THE. “If we could stem the tide on unemployment, most of our problems are solved.

“We talk…often of a three-dimensional problem [of] poverty, unemployment and inequality. But if you look at those three variables, there’s one that leads to the others. We have to create employment, and you create employment by skilling your people. That’s the role of universities.”

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com