College Summit: A Social Business

College Summit founder, J.B Schramm has been passionate about correcting educational inequalities in the United States from a very young age. He was first exposed to these inequalities in high school. Schramm attended an inner-city high school in Denver where he witnessed a close friend who came from a low-income family, not receive the same encouragement and resources as him (who came from a middle class family) to get accepted to a University (“J.B. Schramm”). Later, as Schramm worked alongside admissions officers as part of a job he held at Harvard University, he learned that colleges were seeking talented, intelligent students from low-income backgrounds (“J.B. Schramm”). This is when Schramm realized the issue at hand wasn’t with the quality

Schramm really a social entrepreneur? Although College Summit still has growth that needs to happen financially in order for it to be considered a social business based on Yunus’ standards, when compared against other criteria, College Summit definitely fulfills the standards necessary to be considered a social business. In 2000 J.B. Schramm was elected to be a U.S. Ashoka Fellow. Ashoka is an organization that supports social entrepreneurs through funding and other opportunities (“About Ashoka”). Ashoka has their own set of criteria that constitutes a social entrepreneur including having a new idea, an idea that makes a social impact, creativity, entrepreneurial spirit, and strong ethics and J.B. Schramm fulfilled each in every one of these in order to elected an Ashoka fellow (“Criteria”). Furthermore there are several widely recognized schools of thought regarding social entrepreneurship. One, the social enterprise school of thought, defines a social entrepreneur as someone who “creates a business with a social purpose”(Worth, 398). Schramm falls under this definition of a social entrepreneur, as the whole purpose of his creation of College Summit is to make college accessible to students of all sorts of economic backgrounds. Despite different groups and people having different definitions and requirements for what constitutes a social business or social entrepreneur they all agree on it being a business created for a specific social cause and based on this generalized standard College Summit is a social business and J.B. Schramm is indeed a social