Today, I opened my email and received the sad news that Babson College will no longer be including Professor Len Green's The Ultimate Entrepreneurial Challenge course in the Entrepreneurship curriculum. Len's course was an enlightening experience and helped me become a better thinker, a better worker, and a better entrepreneur. I feel this action is a step backwards for Babson and request that more consideration be taken in this decision.

Babson's reasoning for terminating the course is as follows:

"All of the decisions made in our offerings were made in order to update course offerings and to comply with division demands and constraints around accreditation and teaching loads for fulltime faculty."

The Ultimate Entrepreneurial Challenge is an intense, semester-long course that teaches students more facets of entrepreneurship than any other course at Babson. Students are grouped into companies and pitted against other companies in a number of real-world case challenges. As is the case in the real world, company employees can be traded or fired, and CEOs can be ousted. In this way, students are exposed to the real-world challenges involved with running a business. Students also meet the entrepreneurs that their assigned cases discuss and are given the opportunity to present their solutions to the entrepreneurs themselves. Students gain impactful insight and valuable knowledge through this process.

In The Ultimate Entrepreneurial Challenge, students are constantly put to the test to one-up their peers. No other course has pushed me harder than Len's to think out of the box and go not just the extra mile but the extra 10 miles in order to come out on top. Strategic thinking is highly exercised in the course because students are always on the move to gain knowledge about their competitors, gather the resources they need to create a compelling solution for a case, and develop a company culture. All of these actions are expected of students with little direction from Len simply because an entrepreneur does not necessarily have an instructor when starting a venture.

Len and The Ultimate Entrepreneurial Challenge are extremely popular among students, and the following statistics shine light onto just how popular and impactful the course is:

• The class is consistently given rankings of 85%-95% in the various categories on course evaluation sheet
• 95% of former students responded in the affirmative to the question, “Would you recommend this class to fellow students?”
• Word of mouth recommendations have resulted in The Ultimate Entrepreneurial Challenge being over-enrolled for the last 10 years
• The Ultimate Entrepreneurial Challenge was listed on Inc.com's The Best Entrepreneurship Courses In America

The Ultimate Entrepreneurial Challenge is a course unlike any other and is easily the most memorable class from my undergraduate career at Babson. The learnings I have gained from it are too great to quantify, and it saddens me that future Babson students will not be able to experience it.

I strongly urge Babson College to reconsider its decision to terminate The Ultimate Entrepreneurial Challenge from the Entrepreneurship curriculum.

Respectfully,

Alexander Deeb
Babson College Class of 2014