A Family Affair – Teaching Families Versus Individuals: Insights Gained from 24 Years of Family Business Education

Typically, family business owners have a serious purpose for taking family business classes: They are preparing a new generation to become owners and leaders in their family’s business. Although a growing number of universities today offer family business classes, most are still set up to teach individual learners, not families. Similar to scholars who advanced the need for family business education, this paper advances the need for transgenerational business family learning. As a next step in the evolution of family business education, family business programs at the University of St. Thomas teach families versus individuals. This paper is a longitudinal examination of the development of family business education at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota (UST) and explores the relationship between family members transgenerational learning and outcomes in the family business