It's helpful to learn how to write a resume when there are businesses to apply to, but without those businesses, the resume is just a piece of paper.
This, and much more, is what a team of BYU-Idaho faculty found when they took expeditions to Ghana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Nigeria and Kenya, countries with some of Pathways' fastest-growing enrollment numbers.
Eight out of 10 workers in Sub-Saharan Africa are informally employed, according to the World Bank.
Pathway instructors saw a mismatch between the demographic of students taking the classes and the curriculum being taught.
"... That was not the right fit, for them to spend three whole credits in a place where they have to be an entrepreneur, exploring all the fun reasons to be an entrepreneur," said Casey Hurley, the business and communication dean and a member of the entrepreneurial team.
The team refers to these students as "Entrepreneurs of Necessity."
"There are no jobs. They're not choosing. They have to be an entrepreneur, so we call them entrepreneurs of necessity," said Shane Wasden, the business management chair and entrepreneur team member.
In Nigeria, the team met one student who was a catfish farmer and an herbal dentist.
The entrepreneur found small used diabetes bottles, washed them out and put in a herbal remedy for tooth pain.
While meeting with students in Accra, Ghana, finance faculty member Chris Andrews asked one of the students to load the Canvas course on his phone.
They waited while the phone struggled to load.
Once it actually loaded the page, it requested two-factor identification and the student never got into the course.
The countries where many of these students live have limited computer access, and many pay 60% of their salary for spotty data, according to research conducted by BYU-I.
Additionally, only 15% of students had access to a laptop, and some courses require Excel, which is extremely difficult without a laptop.
"The thing that amazed us is that they took curriculum that wasn't designed really well for them, and everything they could get out of it ... they just took it and use it and we were just amazed," Hurley said.
The team found that many of the students were already running their own start-ups, without the help of formal business knowledge.
To compound the difficulties of unreliable internet and technology, many areas also Fexperience rolling blackouts, causing students to go without electricity for days at a time.
Failing electricity and Internet connection sometimes made it impossible for students to turn assignments in on time.
Some students could not submit assignments because their phones were stolen, or it was too dangerous for them to walk to a location with Internet availability.
In response to these problems, the entrepreneurial certificate was born.
The first pilot course of about 400 students began in April 2023.
Hurley, Wasden, Andrews and other faculty from BYU-I helped design a curriculum and corresponding app to meet these students' needs.
"We didn't want to do what we were previously doing, which is have students learn a lot of theory about entrepreneurship and then go on their way," Hurley said. "We wanted them to start a business and work on their business throughout the certificate or to have already started a business that they could work on applying these things. So the trip confirmed for us that it wasn't crazy to tell students that they needed to do this."
The team created an app similar to the gospel library app.
Students can download content and assignments while online, work on assignments without an internet connection and then they will automatically turn them in once the internet connection is reestablished.
The learning library app only requires 0.6 megabytes to load as compared to Canvas 7.6.
"None of them had money to start a business, but they found a way," Wasden said. "A lot of times entrepreneurs like, 'if I could just get capital, if I could just get funding,' It really doesn't exist, so we had to realize that this entrepreneur curriculum had to be bootstrapping, which means you're gonna fund your own growth. You're gonna buy a little, sell some, reinvest it, buy, reinvest it and then grow slow."
The same principles that worked in these regions ended up applying to local Pathway students as well.
"If I wouldn’t have taken BYU-Pathway, I don’t think I would have had the courage to come in and start a business," said Heather Jensen, the owner of Teton Sourdough Co., in an article by East Idaho News.
Several other adjustments were made.
The team opted to use WhatsApp.
They found it facilitated much more interaction because it is the main messaging platform students were already using.
WhatsApp also provided more mentoring opportunities between students and enabled them to help one another troubleshoot different obstacles to their businesses.
One student asked his boss if he could try what he learned from his business class on customers.
The student ended up selling two properties and making the equivalent of $700, a sum equal to one month's income.
The team also learned that 25 to 30% of students are not members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and approximately 40% of those students are getting baptized, according to Wasden.
"It's a great missionary finding tool, and humbly, like, that's more important than entrepreneurship, that's more important than the class, more important than the certificate," Wasden said.
Pathway is one of the largest online universities in the world, according to Wasden.
"I think it's at a different quality level," Wasden said.
Wasden met an architect who had graduated from one of the local universities but didn't know how to use AutoCAD, the program used to create blueprints.
These gaps in local universities and other online universities are part of what draws students to Pathway.
Pathway's cost per credit is on a sliding scale by location, making it extremely affordable.
Access more information about Pathway here.