Today’s Wall Street Journal has an interesting article by Carl Schramm, “Teaching Entrepreneurship Gets an Incomplete.” Schramm notes that while entrepreneurship courses have been proliferating on our college campuses, we don’t have much evidence that they work — that is, help students actually do the tough work of starting a business.

I’m in the skeptical camp. Perhaps a few students who go through such courses get the motivation and tools to become entrepreneurs, but my guess is that for most students, learning about entrepreneurship is as far as they go. It’s like a music course about great pianists — very intriguing, but by itself that won’t get anyone to actually learn how to play the piano.

Now, learning about entrepreneurship could be valuable in its own right. Far better that students should study about the process of going from an idea to building a firm to take advantage of that idea than studying much of the politicized stuff on offer.

It’s worth thinking about our history here. America used to be bursting with entrepreneurs. (My grandfather was one of them.) New businesses sprouted up all over the country. Today, there aren’t nearly as many entrepreneurs and that’s largely because local, state, and the federal government have put up so many obstacles to business startups. If we want more entrepreneurship, we’ll get much further by dismantling those obstacles than by luring some students into college courses about entrepreneurship.