Presidential Regulation No. 2/2022 renewed this commitment with clearer targets: 1 million new entrepreneurs by 2024, 600,000 from the central government, 400,000 from the regions. Separately, the Agriculture Ministry aims to create 2.5 million millennial entrepreneurs by the end of 2024.

However, recent findings suggest students are not pursuing full-time start-ups. Instead, they are building side ventures alongside formal employment, often as long-term strategies, not transitional steps.

This divergence from conventional models raises a more pressing question: If students are choosing this layered pathway, should not policymakers respond differently, instead of repeating the same approaches and expecting different results?

Earlier frameworks such as the Theory of Planned Behavior, the Entrepreneurial Event Model and Real Options Theory interpret entrepreneurship as a fixed intent, a reaction to shocks or an evaluative step toward self-employment. These models assume a linear path from learning to launching.

Yet they fail to explain the pattern of behavior observed in a recent study. Students in emerging economies engage with entrepreneurial activity and build career paths that embed business activity within traditional employment, rather than positioning business activities outside of it.

Students described their entrepreneurial journeys, what they brought into the class, how their thinking changed and their future plans. A consistent pattern emerged, 75 percent preferred conventional employment, careers in state-owned enterprises, Indonesian-based multinationals or global institutions, yet nearly half planned to run businesses concurrently. These ventures were not viewed as experimental since students framed them as integral to their long-term professional structure.

Students cited financial stability, risk containment, skill application and personal agency as key factors for pursuing these parallel ventures. One respondent wanted to join a multinational firm to build professional networks and gain experience from the formal sector, while also developing a side business to maintain autonomy and flexibility. Others noted these side ventures allowed them to act upon entrepreneurial intent without sacrificing income security or defying familial expectations.

These decisions were not compromises but responses to Indonesia’s economic conditions, employment norms and social structures.

Borrowing from the Four-Layer Entrepreneurial Career Pathway Model, it is clear that students’ entrepreneurial journeys follow a loosely structured progression. These journeys are not a linear process of learning to launching as earlier frameworks suggest.

Instead, students bring varied exposures into the classroom. Some have family business experience, others come from competitions, online selling or financial investments. Some have only academic exposure. This range of exposure shapes their initial level of confidence and intent.

Students with operational experience often have a clear intent to pursue entrepreneurship. However, those with limited experience are more cautious, not due to disinterest but because they lack reference points to ground their entrepreneurial confidence.

As they progress in their entrepreneurship journeys, many students reassess their assumptions, adjusting their goals in response to hands-on learning and team dynamics. This internal shift is compounded by external pressures such as financial constraints, family expectations and employment norms. What emerges is not a single outcome but a range of entrepreneurial paths. Some students pursue full-time ventures, others combine entrepreneurship with salaried work and many build long-term side ventures they do not intend to scale or abandon.

These patterns are deeply rooted in long-standing exposures, what students witnessed growing up, what was affirmed or discouraged and how risk was modeled in their surroundings. Beneath every decision lies a structure, often invisible but profound.

One of the strongest cultural predictors of entrepreneurial orientation is individualism. As Hofstede et al. explain, societies emphasizing individual autonomy and personal initiative tend to produce higher entrepreneurial activity. Indonesia, however, scores low on individualism and high on uncertainty avoidance, traits that discourage risk-taking and favor conformity.

These cultural values, along with short-term orientation and hierarchical structures, create an environment that does not naturally support entrepreneurship. Yet, for the past 80 years, policy and curriculum have largely bypassed these constraints, borrowing models from individualistic contexts and expecting different results without addressing the shared values necessary to foster entrepreneurship.

Viewed from the outcome end, many students chose not to abandon entrepreneurship but to defer it. They did not reject the idea of launching a business, they sequenced it.

This reveals a distinct pattern: The deferred start-up. For many, launching is not off the table, it is just not now. In that delay lies strategy, not hesitation.

This emerging orientation does not suit standard entrepreneurial categories. Students pursuing deferred start-ups are not aspiring founders chasing immediacy or reluctant employees avoiding risk. They are not seeking scale or capital right away. They are building slowly, focused on balance, risk control and long-term sustainability.

If deferred start-ups and layered career strategies are what students are building, then entrepreneurship education must respond accordingly. The current emphasis on rapid launching and venture scaling overlooks dominant behavioral patterns: sustained, low-risk experimentation anchored in long-term planning.

What students need is not more pressure to leap but better tools to manage parallel tracks, navigate side-income regulations and structure ventures that grow at the right pace. This approach to long-term, layered entrepreneurship requires a different educational response, not just in theory, but in what and how we teach.

Programs must broaden their scope beyond the start-up-centric narrative. Students managing businesses alongside employment require knowledge in time allocation, ethical disclosure, side-income taxation and long-term scaling strategies fitting a part-time model. These topics remain underrepresented in most curricula.

Experiential learning remains essential. Students consistently credited start-up simulations, feedback loops and applied testing as catalysts for self-efficacy. This form of education, structured yet uncertain, collaborative yet individualized, mirrors real-world conditions of entrepreneurship. Students without early business exposure were often the most transformed by these environments, demonstrating that entrepreneurial confidence can be taught, not just inherited.

Support must stretch beyond course boundaries. Many students are not ready to launch at graduation, and they know it. They delay not out of fear, but because they are accumulating capital, credibility and insight. Mentorship, alumni networks and flexible incubation environments must reflect these timelines, or students risk disconnecting just as they begin to act.

Finally, exposure must be taken seriously. Students from entrepreneurial households begin with an advantage. But that gap can be closed. When students without early exposure are immersed in applied learning environments, many close the confidence gap quickly. Entrepreneurship has not faded, it is being restructured. Students are not walking away from ambition; they are reorganizing it to fit reality. What they need now is not persuasion, but support for how they are already building.

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The writer is a lecturer in engineering innovation and entrepreneurship at the School of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, Bandung Institute of Technology (STEI-ITB) and School of Agriculture, Gadjah Mada University, and an affiliated alumnus of MIT Sloan School of Management.