The New York Times thinks it has discovered a college trend, that being the desire to innovate. Reporter John Schwartz says that in his supreme knowledge of colleges (as a parent) he’s seen the innovator impulse. And according to him, that’s new.

Schwartz writes:

Now, let’s not get carried away: as a reporter and as a parent, I find myself on plenty of college campuses these days, and many of the students I meet are indistinguishable from the dull-eyed slackers I went to college with (when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and Pluto was still a planet). But then there are those who have this . . . THING, this go-getting excitement to start something, make something. They want money, sure. But the overwhelming desire seems to be to carve out something of their own.

Today’s students have grown up hearing more about Bill Gates than F.D.R., and they live in a world where startling innovations are commonplace. The current crop of 18-year-olds, after all, were 8 when Google was ­founded by two students at Stanford; Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004 while he was at Harvard and they were entering high school…

The easiest way to find kids like these is to check in on entrepreneurship education, in which colleges and universities try to prepare their students to recognize opportunities and seize them.

[sic]

A report issued last year by the Kauffman Foundation, which finances programs to promote innovation on campuses, noted that more than 5,000 entrepreneurship programs are offered on two- and four-year campuses — up from just 250 courses in 1985.

Okay, yes, there are more entrepreneurship programs in colleges, but does that mean that college students are becoming more innovative? Or does it just mean that more are buying into not-so-innovative established programs, programs which oxymoronically teach students how to be “different” from their fellow “innovative” compatriots?