Out of 140 university entrepreneurship centers surveyed, 87 are using Excel to track their impact. Another 57 said they rely on Google Drive.
The average program is juggling more than two systems. And a significant number of the people running these programs say, openly, that they don’t trust the accuracy of their own data.
Those numbers come from the 2025 State of Entrepreneurship Education survey, conducted by the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers (GCEC) in partnership with the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business.
The study, led by Elisa Grossman, Professor of Clinical Entrepreneurship at USC, collected responses from 140 institutions and paints a striking picture of how entrepreneurship centers operate today.
Coworks did not conduct this research or participate in its design. But the findings map directly to the challenges we hear from university program leaders every week.
And they point to a problem that better spreadsheets won’t solve.
The survey covered seven areas, from institutional profile and staffing to metrics, financial headwinds, and AI adoption. Four themes stood out:
75% of centers now serve the entire university, not just business students. Whether housed in a business school or operating independently, the vast majority of entrepreneurship centers describe their mission as campus-wide. Engineering students, design students, faculty, and sometimes community members all flow through a single hub.
Metrics tracking is widespread in theory, broken in practice. Almost every school says they use specific measures. But the systems are fragmented. Excel, Google Drive, Startup Tree, and Airtable are the top tools, and most schools are using a patchwork of two or more. Only 20–25% of U.S. programs consistently capture data. About 13% capture nothing at all.
27% of U.S. institutions expect fewer financial resources next year. Among schools facing pressure, 40% are cutting or reducing programs, 35% have hiring freezes, and one in three are slashing food and marketing budgets. Public schools are especially feeling the squeeze.
There’s a disconnect between what directors value and what leadership demands. Program directors focus on student learning, mindset development, and community building. Institutional leadership wants hard metrics: ventures created, capital raised, jobs produced. One respondent described the expectation as building a “unicorn farm.”
It was during his time at NC State University that Coworks CEO DeShawn Brown became part of the NC State Entrepreneurial Clinic. And he credits that experience to helping him launch not one but two companies.
The data problem at entrepreneurship centers isn’t really about spreadsheets. It’s about the fact that the physical space, the programming, the membership, and the reporting all live in separate worlds.
Consider what a typical center manages on a given day:
All of that activity generates data. But when each piece lives in a different tool, nobody has the full picture. The person trying to pull a report for the dean is spending hours reconciling spreadsheets instead of running programs. And even after all that work, the numbers feel shaky.
That’s not a reporting problem. It’s an infrastructure problem. And it’s the exact problem space management software was built to solve.
Coworks is a space management platform built for community-driven flexible workspaces. It handles room booking, desk check-ins, event management, membership, billing, and access control in a single system.
And because it captures activity data as a natural byproduct of daily operations, the reporting takes care of itself.
Here’s what that means in practice for an entrepreneurship center:
One system instead of five. Room bookings, desk check-ins, event registrations, and membership records all live in the same platform. No more reconciling across Excel, Google Drive, and whatever else you’ve been patching together.
Data you can actually trust. When a student checks in, books a room, or registers for an event, that activity is captured automatically. No manual entry, no duplicate spreadsheets, no numbers you have to second-guess.
Reports that answer the questions leadership is asking. How many unique students used the center last quarter? Which programs drive the most engagement? What’s the utilization rate on your maker space? You can pull those numbers in minutes, not weekends.
Reports that answer the questions you’re asking, too. Where are students spending their time? What’s building community? What’s working? The same data that satisfies your dean also helps you make better decisions about your own programming.
Revenue tools built in. If you’re exploring fee-based access to maker spaces, membership tiers, or external rentals—as the GCEC data suggests many schools are—Coworks handles billing and automated invoicing natively. You don’t need a separate payment system.
Coworks wasn’t originally built for universities. We built it for coworking space operators: the people managing shared desks, meeting rooms, memberships, and community in flexible workspaces.
But the operational DNA is remarkably similar.
An entrepreneurship center is a coworking space. You’re managing physical space, onboarding a rotating community, booking rooms, running events, handling access, and trying to understand what’s happening in your space. The difference is that you also need to report that activity to institutional leadership in a way that justifies your budget.
That’s why the platform works so well in this context. It was built from day one to manage exactly this kind of operation. University programs aren’t a side use case for us. They’re a natural extension of what the software already does.
40% of c-centers are already cutting or reducing programs. One in three are slashing food and marketing budgets. 35% have hiring freezes in place. And 61% of all respondents say they’re actively looking for new donors.
The financial headwinds in the GCEC data make this feel urgent. When 27% of schools expect fewer resources and 40% of those are already cutting programs, the ability to demonstrate value isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a survival skill.
Centers that can show clean, reliable data on utilization, engagement, and outcomes are in a fundamentally stronger position. Stronger when the dean asks what you accomplished last quarter. Stronger when you’re writing a grant proposal. Stronger when you’re making the case for more space, more staff, or simply the right to keep the doors open.
Centers that can’t produce those numbers—not because they aren’t doing great work, but because they’re buried in spreadsheets—are the ones most at risk.
I’m a product of a university entrepreneurship center.
The mentors, the programming, the physical space where you could sit across from someone two steps ahead of you and just absorb how they thought about problems—that experience shaped the trajectory of my career. I wouldn’t be running Coworks and other companies today without it.
So when I read that 13% of programs aren’t capturing any data at all, or that directors feel pressured to produce metrics they don’t trust, I don’t see an abstract problem.
I see the centers that changed my life struggling to prove it matters.
These programs deserve better tools. The students walking through your doors today deserve a center that has the breathing room to focus on them instead of fighting with spreadsheets. And the directors running these programs deserve infrastructure that works as hard as they do.
That’s what we built Coworks to be. If you run a university entrepreneurship center and any of this sounds familiar, I’d love to talk.
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