A deceptive jobs claim keeps cropping up at Bloch School

One of the hammers in the Bloch School’s promotional toolbox is a three-digit number: 512.

That is supposedly the number of jobs each entrepreneur “was expected to create” on average “in his or her lifetime.” University of Missouri-Kansas City officials have repeatedly used that figure to emphasize the importance of the Bloch School’s entrepreneurship program while seeking recognition and support from donors.

For every 100 budding entrepreneurs trained at Bloch, then-dean Teng-Kee Tan once told a national audience, the result is a “lifetime output of 51,200 jobs created by each graduating class.”

Problem is, the number is somewhere between misleading and bogus.

It first appeared in a 2009 journal article that Michael Song co-authored with fellow faculty members Mark Parry and Lisa Zhao, who was married to Song at the time, and based on a survey of 11,259 U.S. entrepreneurs.

However, Song recently acknowledged in an interview that his study did not conclude 512 was the average number of jobs each entrepreneur was expected to create in his or her lifetime.

It was the average number that the entrepreneurs surveyed said they expected to create in their lifetimes.

At the time of the survey, respondents had actually created 75 jobs, on average, according to figures that Song supplied at The Star’s request. The median number of jobs created was just nine.

In Song’s defense, UMKC pointed out that English is his second language and that he might not have grasped the distinction. Parry, however, is a native speaker but, through an attorney, declined comment. Zhao did not respond to a request for comment.

In fact, there is no credible number for how many jobs the average entrepreneur will create in a lifetime, said Robert Litan, an economist formerly of the Kauffman Foundation and Brookings Institution.

“Because (there’s) such a huge dispersion of successful entrepreneurs — from Gates, Jobs, with tens of thousands, to locally successful entrepreneurs with 20-30,” he said.

Even so, the 512 jobs claim continues to turn up. It recently appeared in an application for a $2.5 million grant from the Kauffman Foundation and the appendix of the Bloch School’s application that won UMKC the 2014 model undergraduate program award from the U.S. Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship.

This story was originally published July 26, 2014 at 1:00 PM with the headline "A deceptive jobs claim keeps cropping up at Bloch School."