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Throughout the year they work on developing a business plan for their own business, which they present and defend in the spring. If they choose, they can then enter local, city, state, and national competitions to become one of the national finalists. In 2010, President Obama met with the finalists, who were chosen from an original pool of 20,000 entrants. The overall winner, Nia Froome, a seventeen-year-old student from Valley Stream, New York, received the $10,000 grand prize for the business she started, Mamma Nia’s Vegan Bakery. Bosnian immigrants Zermina Velic and Belma Ahmetovic, from Hartford, took first runner-up for their computer services company, Beta Bytes, which they started to help fellow immigrants deal with their computer problems.

Many students drop out of school today because they can’t make a connection with their teachers or their curricula, noted Rosen. “What NFTE does is engage their brains in projects they feel are relevant and bring out that individual thing we all have,” she explained. “Remember, free enterprise is all based on individuality and people finding their own path to independence. And when you find a way for kids to engage their brains and combine it with a way for them to discover their individual interest, you have a winning combination.”

These students “have a lot of street smarts,” Rosen added. “Most of them are surviving in really challenging environments. So if you just give them the minimum amounts of information and show them the world beyond their communities, many of them are natural entrepreneurs. They see all kinds of opportunities. They see a way to make a living in this world in a whole different way.”

A documentary about NFTE entitled Ten9Eight was released in 2009, which is how we found out about the program. The three finalists that year were an immigrant’s son, who took a class from H&R Block and invented a company to do tax returns for high school and college students; a young woman who taught herself how to sew and designed custom-made dresses; and the winner, an African American boy who manufactured “socially meaningful” T-shirts. The young woman who started the clothing business “turned down an Ivy League college to attend Northwestern,” said Rosen, “because Northwestern promised her a single room so she could bring her sewing machine to school.”

Creative Crimson Tide

Many colleges attempt to teach creativity and critical thinking. One of the more novel programs for this purpose is the Creative Campus, initiated by the University of Alabama. Hank Lazer, the associate provost for academic affairs and the program’s executive director, explained to Tom that it all started by accident—by students looking for something extra. In 2005, the university was offering an honors seminar called “Art and Public Purpose,” about how public institutions can support the arts. At the end of the term the thirteen students, rather than write individual papers, banded together and “presented a long report and recommendations to the provost on how to broaden and deepen the exposure to the arts by Alabama students on and off campus, so students not majoring in the arts could be more artistically expressive,” said Lazer. “They thought it was important.” So did the university leadership, which had recently commissioned a study that found that some 70 percent of entering University of Alabama students had participated in a band, a choir, a yearbook staff, a newspaper, or something involving the arts, but only 19 percent did so while in college. “That was a disturbing statistic, coming at a time when ‘creativity’ was emerging as the new necessity for an educated person—and to get a job,” said Lazer.

The university leadership got the message, and in 2006 it initiated a program called Creative Campus, designed to nurture creativity among students by getting them to think about how to promote the arts in their community, on and off campus. The program was given