swot for ncssm's cep
strengths
The Colopy Entrepreneurship Program is uniquely positioned within NCSSM, which is inarguably the best public high school in America. NCSSM was built to let educators take bold risks and pioneer new models of teaching and learning. This is inherently entrepreneurial! The experimental nature of the school makes the Entrepreneurship Program seem like a natural placement with strong institutional alignment, and more importantly, it confirms a structured lenience to explore the implementation of cutting-edge forms of entrepreneurship for high school students.
The students themselves are a huge strength. They are among the most highly motivated, top-achieving scholars in the country! Many would shrivel in the face of brain teasers that NCSSM students would genuinely find joy in. When the CEP puts out Lunch & Learns, students show up. These students are exactly the kind who will lean all the way into interdisciplinary, venture-based learning opportunities. The program only needs to stay in their conscience for momentum to pick back up this Fall.
A reminder: the professional environment at NCSSM enables you to design initiatives with fewer bureaucratic hurdles than you’d find at any other public school in the state. Entering year two, the program and its director are no longer “new.” Hallways are familiar, and so are colleagues. Implicit functions of the school will continue to reveal themselves. This year, you know where to look for grants, what will fly, and what needs an extra conversation. Even more liberating: financially, the Program will benefit from two more half-million-dollar installments into the Colopy Family Technology and Entreprenerushp Endowment Fund. It’s not often a new program’s new director has this kind of safety net to develop a new academic program – let alone in a public school.
Securing an academic anchor by teaching a course during J-Term and potentially a semester-long class will only further legitimize and embed the program into the school’s practices. These courses are a prime chance to excite the venturer’s spirit in numerous NCSSM students.
Lastly, you’re dealing with high schoolers. Pizza still works. It always will.
weaknesses
On a practical level, being located in a basement office in the back corner does no favors to the Entrepreneurship Program — especially as you went through your first year on the faculty. I would personally recommend spending as much “free” time as possible out in the Woolworths Room, the main building, and similar common spaces.
It is imperative that students know who you are. As the only faculty member of the Colopy Entrepreneurship Program, you may have to lean into becoming a sort of “campus celebrity.” Though we work hard for a student to feel confident starting a conversation; as the educator serving these bright young adults, it is on you to build a sense of familiarity and trust with students so they can at least know what you get paid to do!
While the Colopy gift is as large as it seems, the past academic year revealed frustrations with non-discretionary funding for CEP activities. As of now, The Colopy Family Endowment for Technology Entrepreneurship fund cannot be accessed for funding beyond the Director salary. It should be deemed a worst-case scenario if there should ever be a situation where a student wants to accelerate an idea, and the Colopy Entrepreneurship Program has to send them elsewhere for resources.
opportunities
In 2022, NCDPI unveiled its “Portrait of a Graduate,” identifying skills that students should possess “in order to thrive in a 21st century place of work” (NCDPI, 2022). The release of the Portrait included resources and tools including rubrics, skills activities, and ‘performance tasks’ to support school implementation. An explicit alignment to these standards could help move the Program from a “nice-to-have” to a state-endorsed and recognized component of the school.
The Research Triangle offers an immense innovation ecosystem with many opportunities for collaboration and supplementation for the Program. A growing trend of private companies partnering with K-12 schools can be leveraged by the Program to form strategic partnerships with local companies for mentorship and real industry projects. From a companies’ perfective, partnering with a program like NCSSM’s CEP is a chance to shape the skills of its future workforce. Capitalising on this trend would expand CEP’s capacity to attract students as a bridge between school and industry.
A 2023 United Way national poll reveals a third of Gen Z youth said they are regularly involved in social justice efforts (United Way NCA, 2024). Gen Z’s desire for impact can fuel growth in entrepreneurial learning if the Program brands itself as a hub for solution-makers and not just startup founders. Framing program activities in terms of solving real community problems emphasizes entrepreneurship as a civic tool primed for students’ idealism.
Across the U.S., education systems are experimenting with digital badges or certificates called “micro-credentials” to recognize and verify discrete competencies and high-value skills (Galindo, 2023). North Carolina’s “SparkNC” initiative supports modular learning experiences which can be combined for elective course credit (NCDPI, 2024), reflecting a broadening acceptance to competency-based learning credentials. The CEP’s Director has already expressed the interest in adding a certificate program for student “microlearning efforts” (Faircloth, 2024), and its coordination with state standards could mean student conversion of these credentials into course credit and demonstrated career-readiness.
threats
A core threat to the viability of the CEP is its donor dependency. The $1.5 million endowment is an extraordinary gift, but it’s also finite. Beyond the Colopy gift, there seems to be no diversified funding strategy or clear plan for sustaining the program. Without future investment, or if the Colopy family shifts its engagement, the CEP has no diversified revenue strategy in place to maintain itself.
Within the school, year one identified a lot of challenges that mitigated the program getting off the ground running as it had hoped. The most prevalent disappointment was realizing that a high school, although part of the UNC System, could silo its departments almost – if not as badly as a university. Entrepreneurship education, as we know, is innately interdisciplinary. It becomes extremely difficult to implement if you can’t reach multiple stakeholders across academic departments all at once.
After the Program had been inaugurated, multiple different factions of entrepreneurship continue to exist at NCSSM. Frustratingly, faculty who do their entrepreneurship programming independently seemed unwilling to yield their grasp on the matter. Whether the benefactor was aware of these pre-existing pockets of entrepreneurship or not, the ambitious goals of the Colopy Program — and the scope of your role — will bear less fruit if students sign up for entrepreneurship experiences only to realize it is not under the Colopy Entrepreneurship Program.
The faculty involved in these fragmented experiences should be corralled. Perhaps as the only faculty with the word "entrepreneurship" in your title at NCSSM, you can assert to colleagues that students who show interest in entrepreneurial endeavors should be rerouted directly to you. I believe this clarification would funnel more students to you and as such, the program would reach a greater portion of its total addressable market.