One University's Radical Bet: Teaching Entrepreneurship as a Survival Skill

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-18

### Why a Small Costa Rican University Is Betting Big on Entrepreneurship What if the most important class you ever took wasn't about balancing equations or memorizing dates, but about learning how to survive professional upheaval? That's the question Allan Matarrita-Chinchilla, a professor at ULACIT in Costa Rica, has been answering for years. At his university, entrepreneurship isn't an elective for business majors. It's a required survival skill for everyone. That might sound dramatic, but think about it. The average person changes careers not once, not twice, but multiple times. Industries rise and fall faster than ever. A degree used to be a ticket to a stable 30-year career. Now it's more like a passport that expires. ULACIT's approach flips the script: instead of preparing students for a specific job, they prepare them to create opportunities when jobs disappear. ### The Classroom That Feels Like a Startup Walk into one of Matarrita-Chinchilla's classes and you won't see rows of students passively taking notes. You'll see teams pitching ideas, testing prototypes, and failing fast. The curriculum is built around real projects, not hypothetical case studies. Students interview local businesses, identify problems, and build solutions. Some of those solutions become actual companies. "We don't teach entrepreneurship as a theoretical subject," Matarrita-Chinchilla explains. "We teach it as a mindset. It's about spotting gaps, taking calculated risks, and learning from mistakes without falling apart." That mindset matters far beyond startup founders. Nurses, teachers, engineers—everyone faces moments when their industry shifts under their feet. The ability to pivot, to spot a new opportunity, and to act on it is what separates those who thrive from those who get left behind. ### The Skills That Actually Transfer ULACIT's program focuses on a handful of core capabilities that apply to almost any career path: - **Opportunity recognition**: Training your brain to see problems as possibilities, not dead ends. - **Resourcefulness**: Making something from nothing, whether it's a budget, a team, or a market. - **Resilience**: Bouncing back from rejection and failure without losing momentum. - **Storytelling**: Selling your idea to investors, employers, or customers in a way that sticks. These aren't soft skills. They're survival skills. And they're teachable. > "Entrepreneurship education isn't about turning every student into a founder. It's about turning every student into someone who can navigate uncertainty with confidence." — Allan Matarrita-Chinchilla ### What This Means for the Rest of Us ULACIT's model offers a blueprint that universities everywhere could learn from. The world doesn't need more graduates who can only function in stable, predictable environments. It needs people who can adapt, innovate, and lead when the ground shifts. That's the real lesson here. Entrepreneurship isn't just a career path. It's a life skill. And the sooner we start teaching it that way, the better prepared the next generation will be for whatever comes next. So whether you're a student, a mid-career professional, or someone just trying to stay relevant, ask yourself: what would change if you treated your own career like a startup? You might just find that the skills you need are already within reach.