For 6th Straight Year, NJIT Is Top 50 in Entrepreneurship

Written by: Andrew McMains

Published: Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Student pitch themselves to potential employers at a reverse career fair.

For the sixth straight year, New Jersey Institute of Technology undergraduate program for entrepreneurship ranks top 50 nationally, according to The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine.

At No. 44, NJIT improved three places from last year. Also, its graduate program for entrepreneurship rose two places to No. 29, making it the only New Jersey school on the list. The grad ranking began last year.

“Day in, day out, we help students turn knowledge into action,” said Oya Tukel, dean of NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management (MTSM), a key hub for entrepreneurship at the university. “We help them recognize gaps in the business world and hatch business plans that address them. As a result, they’re primed to become productive members of society.”

The spokes in NJIT’s entrepreneurship wheel include:

NJII Venture Studio, a partnership of NJIT’s New Jersey Innovation Institute and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority that nurtures research and development, innovation and entrepreneurship
Center for Student Entrepreneurship, which focuses exclusively on undergrads and is led by Executive Director of Student Entrepreneurship Kathy Naasz, a research professor at MTSM
Center for Translational Research, which seeks to commercialize faculty intellectual property
Paul Profeta Community Entrepreneurship Program, which delivers workshops to underserved business founders in Newark

In addition, NJIT is a partner in a Northeast hub of the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps, which funds academic research that aims to solve real-world problems. The other partners include Princeton and Yale.

The top 50 schools on the undergrad and grad lists emerged from a field of more than 300 universities and colleges that The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur considered.

They based their selections on a survey of entrepreneurship-related majors, minors, courses, competitions and centers. The survey also weighed outside-the-classroom mentorship and the companies that alumni have started in the last five years.

“We highly recommend the schools that made our lists for 2025,” said Rob Franek, editor in chief of The Princeton Review. “Their faculties are outstanding. Their programs have robust experiential components. Their students have access to extraordinary mentors as well as networking contacts that will serve them well into their careers.”