President Donald Trump ran on a promise of regulatory reforms to make it easier to do business in the U.S.– and he couldn’t have arrived in the White House at a better time to do so. A recent poll found that 40 percent of school students in grades 5 through 12 are interested in starting a business after graduating.
That’s according to the result of Gallup’s annual HOPE survey, which measures how well the nation’s schools are preparing American youth for young adulthood.
From the polling: “More than one in four students in grades nine to 12 (27%) say they plan to start a business, down from the 33% to 35% range found among this group from 2011 to 2015. In contrast, a majority of students in grades five to eight (55%) say they plan to start their own business.”
Gallup explains the age gap in entrepreneurial ambition thusly: “The majority of students in grades five to eight have intentions of starting their own business, but few have access to classes on how to achieve this goal later in their lives. Meanwhile, their older peers in high school lack entrepreneurial ambition, despite increased availability of classes on the subject. This could suggest that as children get older — and perhaps have a better sense of what kind of work they want to do and the work involved in that role — they find the idea of being a business owner less appealing.”
It would also be that older students are less enthused about starting a new business adventure because of the regulatory confusion they learn they will face. For young Americans looking to start a new business, there are a numbers of regulatory hurdles that can be extremely difficult to understand and deal with, from tax stipulations to certain occupational and business licensing requirements. And often the more ambitious a business idea, the higher the number of regulatory headaches a business owner will face. .
Trump, to his credit, is working to change some of that by working to weaken regulations affecting existing businesses. And in several states, like Mississippi, there are efforts underway to eliminate senseless occupational licensing rules.