Entrepreneurship Program Empowers Prisoners

• A new Wharton program sends MBAs into jails to teach critical business skills to incarcerated individuals.
• Previously incarcerated people who are part of the program experience easier socioeconomic reintegration and other cascading benefits.
• Participating MBAs gain confidence, build stronger leadership skills, and develop a deeper sense of empathy.

 
“Yale or jail.”

In the U.S., this saying often suggests that students who don’t go to the most elite institutions will end up out-of-work, homeless, or in prison. It also points to the fact that the price of incarceration sometimes can exceed that of an Ivy League education. The average annual cost of incarceration is estimated to be more than 40,000 USD per prisoner at the federal level, and it’s even more in some states: 90,885 USD per incarcerated person in Connecticut and well over 100,000 USD in Wyoming, California, and New York. Compare that to the current price of a year at Yale (83,880 USD per student). Yale or jail, indeed.

While obviously there are many paths between those two extremes, the phrase highlights the fact that mass incarceration is a major problem in the U.S. It is not unique to the United States, but here is where the problem is most acute.

At the end of December 2022, there were 1,675,400 people in American prisons. That’s a per capita incarceration rate of just under 600 people per 100,000 residents. Of these, an alarming proportion are reincarcerated: Estimates suggest that of the 600,000 to 700,000 people released from jail every year, more than half are reincarcerated within three years.

Is there anything business schools can do to help solve the problem of recidivism in the United States?

The Initial Experiment

Back in 2015, I became interested in what happens to people when they leave American prisons. Research shows they struggle with the stigma of incarceration, which can act as a barrier to employment and housing. As a result, a relatively high proportion of them seek to start their own small businesses—becoming, say, self-employed caterers, electricians, fashion designers, fitness instructors, landscapers, painters, and decorators—as a means of fending for themselves within a socioeconomic context that makes recidivism a very real risk.

I was intrigued by the entrepreneurship dynamic among people in this demographic. I wondered whether a business education could help them either launch businesses or find employment in general. Would learning foundational skills in topics such as entrepreneurship and personal finance help them break the cycles of incarceration and poverty?

At the time, I was teaching amazing MBA students at Columbia University Business School in New York City. An idea took root in my mind, and I discussed it with socially minded colleagues at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business in Charlottesville. What if Columbia Business School could find a way to impart business skills to people who were serving sentences in prison? We not only could help prepare them for life upon release, but also could accelerate the way we educate MBAs as future business leaders.

We began a pilot program in partnership with Resilience Education, a pioneering U.S. nonprofit that specializes in providing MBA-style education to people in prisons. First, MBA students completed a module that gave them the context and tools to teach incarcerated individuals. Next, students went into prisons and taught co-designed curricula to cohorts of these learners.

Would learning foundational skills in topics such as entrepreneurship and personal finance help formerly incarcerated individuals break the cycles of incarceration and poverty?

The win for the learners: a chance to pick up rigorous and relevant business skills they could use in the real world. For the MBAs: exposure to a diverse group of human beings and the opportunity to hone leadership and communication skills within a context of real societal impact.

While it started as an experiment of sorts, the initiative has continued and grown. It also has followed my career as I moved on from Columbia to join the faculty at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. 2023 saw the official launch of Resilience Education | Wharton WORKS, which was developed in partnership with Wharton’s Coalition for Equity and Opportunity and enthusiastically supported by Wharton’s dean, Erika James.

Here’s how it works.

Inside the Prison Walls

MBA students opt to take a course that I have developed called Reforming Mass Incarceration and the Role of Business (RMI). This course not only educates MBA students about the mass incarceration crisis in the U.S., but also introduces them to ways they can promote and participate in solutions. Even students who already have some understanding of mass incarceration walk away enlightened and motivated to participate in change.

A critical component of the course is the series of presentations by a wide range of speakers, including those who have been (and continue to be) directly impacted by the criminal justice system. The preparatory work done in the RMI course helps MBA instructors build the mindset that incarcerated learners are human beings with great, but often underappreciated, potential.

After completing this module, pairs of MBAs go into a prison to teach core courses in entrepreneurship and financial literacy. Prison staff help organize the courses, which last 10 weeks and include two teaching sessions per week.

About 25 learners are in each prison classroom. They have been prescreened to make sure they meet behavioral criteria, and there never have been any security issues during sessions. It’s important to note that while the learners have been incarcerated for a broad range of crimes and infractions, they are not seen or defined by their backgrounds. In my experience, learners do equally well irrespective of their crimes.

At the end of the program, learners earn certificates that they can use to obtain parole and to secure opportunities once they have been released.

Impact on All Participants

From feedback captured in class and via survey mechanisms, we know that the program is well-received. It also is starting to generate concrete outcomes.

In the seven years that we have been partnering with Resilience Education, we have seen a small number of ventures start up, including some nonprofits. A fairly common theme among the new business owners is the desire to give back to communities that they came from and are returning to. Perhaps even more encouraging is the anecdotal evidence that these entrepreneurs go on to hire other formerly incarcerated people, helping them in turn to break free of recidivism and poverty.

Most participating MBA students report feeling greater empathy, noting that the experience has fast-tracked their growth as compassionate, responsible leaders.

The response among MBAs also has been overwhelmingly positive and enthusiastic. These solution-oriented individuals are part of a generation that is arguably more engaged and socially aware than any other. For these future leaders, this experience provides real-world exposure and learnings that can have ongoing effects throughout their careers.

In terms of personal development, students walk away with enhanced confidence and communication capabilities. Many talk about how teaching a business subject has deepened their own technical understanding, saying, “You have to know it to explain it.”

Just as important, most participants report feeling greater empathy, noting that the experience has fast-tracked their growth as compassionate, responsible leaders. Many have sought opportunities to continue to teach or use their influence to start pro bono initiatives.

A number of MBAs who took the program have gone on to become change agents within hiring organizations. One was promoted to the C-suite and instituted a program to recruit people released from prison. Another adapted material from the U.S. Department of Justice to create software that simulates the challenges awaiting incarcerated people upon their release from prison. I now use the simulation in my RMI course as a critical way to help students develop understanding and empathy.

Plans for the Future

My next objective is to expand the program. For instance, I am working with colleagues at Wharton and Columbia to create an online version of the course that can be used in any business school.

In addition, at Wharton, we’ve set the ambitious target of having 60 MBA students go through the RMI course each year. The goal is to help 3,000 currently or formerly incarcerated Americans get jobs by 2030 and help 300 formerly incarcerated people successfully launch their businesses. One way we will do this is by leveraging our ecosystem to expand hiring opportunities. We also plan to offer formerly incarcerated people opportunities such as mentoring sessions and training programs in high-demand skills.

We can rely on partnerships to minimize the costs of these activities and maximize the expertise available to us. Incredible organizations like Resilience Education already provide curricula tailored to the present and future needs of learners. We find that the burden of setting up licensing fees and transportation costs is not onerous when compared to the return on investment for society.

Business Schools as Agents of Social Change

Of course, all this effort begs a question: Why should business schools invest in this kind of activity at all?

First, I would say that such programs speak to our competence. Business schools are experts in teaching business topics to diverse groups. It’s what we do. As a professor with more than 20 years’ experience teaching MBAs, I find that this program sits well within my personal wheelhouse. It is an area where my colleagues and I can contribute genuine expertise to accelerate the impact of NGOs such as Resilience Education.

Addressing some of the most entrenched and intractable societal problems via direct action is an opportunity for business schools to do more than pay lip service to the loftier goals we share.

Second, I believe that these programs enable us to make a measurable impact. When I began my own long journey in education and academia, it was customary for professors to view business and society as two separate ideas. But over time, we’ve come to see business as part of the fabric of our communities.

Today, most business schools worth their salt talk about our responsibility to develop principled, ethical leaders who have the vision and the values to do better by people and the planet. Addressing some of the most entrenched and intractable societal problems via direct action—via multidirectional learning—is an opportunity to do more than pay lip service to the loftier goals we share.

And finally, I’d add this from experience: MBAs care about social problems. This is a generation for whom the boundaries between education and life—between investing in self-development and making a positive impact on others—are essentially blurred. To deny this is to misread an entire generation of students and future leaders. And as educators, we do not want to make that mistake.

It is my fervent hope that colleagues reading this will find inspiration to develop similar programs or find their own creative solutions to our collective challenges. And as business education adapts to changing times, perhaps the familiar phrase will shift from “Yale or jail” to “Yale in jail.”