Family Inc.: The New B-School Job Choice

With fewer jobs available, students are starting to give family businesses a second look. Schools are offering new classes and programs

By Alison Damast

Jonathan Miller entered the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (Nebraska-Lincoln Undergraduate Business Profile) four years ago intent on graduating with a job that would put distance between him and the business that his father founded back in the mid-1990s, Reliant Transportation, a Lincoln-based logistics company specializing in bulk freight transportation. Though he'd spent time around the business, attending company meetings and even helping develop its information technology system, Miller was looking for a change. "I'd lived in Lincoln pretty much all my growing-up years and was looking forward to getting out," says Miller.

But when the 22-year-old business management major started his job search this past fall, applying for positions at companies like Koch Industries, Union Pacific Railroad, and others, he quickly encountered the most difficult job market for new college graduates in years. Over winter break, his father mentioned an opening at Reliant, and Miller began to seriously mull it over, even signing up for a new class in family business offered at his school. The class helped assuage some of his concerns, such as how to address any potential conflict that might arise between him and his father and how to define his role in the business. By the time spring rolled around, he'd signed on as Reliant's new director of information technology, where he'll oversee the compliance division and help roll out a new accounting system.

"I don't see this as settling at all. I see this as a giant opportunity to really help out the family business and make it grow," says Miller, who graduates this May.

Renewed Interest

Miller is part of a small but growing number of undergraduate business students opting to return to their family businesses directly after graduation, rather than seeking a job in Corporate America or on Wall Street. It's a decision that would have been unthinkable for many a few years back. But faced with the bleak job and salary outlook for new college graduates, students are giving the family business a second look and, in some instances, even opting to start their own, professors and family business experts say. Schools with family business programs and centers say enrollment in courses devoted to the topic is on the uptick, with more students keen on learning how to navigate the unique management challenges and delicate intergenerational dynamics that family businesses face.

"A decade ago, it was like, 'You've got to be kidding me, I'm not going to throw my life away,' " says Dianne Welsh, the director of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro's Entrepreneurship Center, which recently introduced an undergraduate family business class and will soon be rolling out a graduate-level course. "Now they are looking at it totally differently."

The renewed interest in family-owned businesses on college campuses comes at an opportune time for students; in the past decade or so, dozens of schools have added family business classes to their curricula, launched centers devoted to study of the topic, and, in a handful of cases, even started majors and minors in the subject. There are now 180 universities that offer family business centers, educational programs, and forums, according to the Family Firm Institute, a research group in Boston.

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