Mentorship and The Relevance of College for Entrepreneurs

I read a variety of newspapers from the U.S., U.K. and the Gulf. I have a penchant for articles about business, entrepreneurship, technology, and education. Something that is making the rounds recently (the last 6 months of 2013 till now) is the increasing popularity of the mentorship model in fostering entrepreneurship (as well as professional development for teachers, but that's a different blogpost). Almost every article on the topic exhorts the importance of finding the right mentors from whom to learn. The right mentors can teach a newbie entrepreneur about the 'real' world of business, can help the newbie develop the soft skills necessary for success, can give the newbie an insight into specific industries, can share with the newbie inspiring experiences, and can introduce the newbie to otherwise inaccessible networks of contacts. In these articles, the presumption is that the mentor is providing the newbie learning experiences that formal schooling doesn't offer. This is probably true; which immediately raises these questions: What is it that formal schooling actually offers? What is the value of formal schooling? 

In one of our first businesses almost 10 years ago, a European-style cafe a few blocks from a well-known private university in Los Angeles, my co-founder husband and I had a staff made up primarily of college students. After that experience, we had a name for workers with no "common sense": college students. It's not that our college student staff were dumb, au contraire, they were highly intelligent; but it seemed that their intelligence applied only to things like writing papers and taking tests, and not to so called "low skilled" tasks like making lattes and serving cheesecake. I was actually a college student at the time as well and I personally questioned the value of college. Was it just an intellectual exercise with no practical application? 

Fast forward to today, seems like nothing has changed. A fresh college graduate today is no more clued-in than those from back then; hence the need for mentorship. In my humble opinion, two things need to happen to make college relevant again. First, make everything task-based and link curriculum and assessment to real world applications. For instance, the course work for a marketing class should be to find an existing SME for which to develop and implement a marketing plan (this does take a full semester in the real world). Second, college students shouldn't be admitted fresh out of high school. They should get a couple of years of work under their belts before starting college. 18 year-olds are a distracted bunch: family, friends, social life, cool new gadgets, having fun, etc. It is really the exceptional ones that have the focus it takes to squeeze every bit out of the college experience. For most, it's just a means to an end, attend lectures, pass exams, get a degree, get a job. At that age, they barely know who they are, let alone what they want to do. It takes a taste of the real world to gain true insight and focus.

If you are an entrepreneur who's been in college (at some point) and have/had a mentor, tell me which you think is/was more valuable.