Entrepreneurship vs Business Administration: Which Degree Fits You

BS Business Administration and BS Entrepreneurship are not two names for the same degree. The Commission on Higher Education prescribes them under two separate memorandum orders issued on the same day in 2017, and the two curricula diverge on almost everything that matters: total units, core subjects, what you produce in your final year, and whether you spend 600 hours inside somebody else's company.

Here is the short version. BSBA teaches you to run the parts of an organisation that already exists. BS Entrepreneurship makes you build one and open it before you graduate. If you want the detail on either programme on its own, we have a BSBA degree guide and a BS Entrepreneurship guide. This post is about choosing between them.

The two memorandum orders

Both programmes sit under CHED memorandum orders dated 2017:

• BSBA — CMO No. 17, series of 2017, "Revised Policies, Standards and Guidelines for the Bachelor of Science in Business Administration"
• BS Entrepreneurship — CMO No. 18, series of 2017, "Revised Policies, Standards and Guidelines for the Bachelor of Science in Entrepreneurship"

These set the minimum. A school can add units and courses on top, and many do. When a school's own curriculum sheet disagrees with the numbers below, the school's sheet is what you will actually study, and the registrar is who you should ask.

CMO No. 17 also did some housekeeping worth knowing: it discontinued the old Bachelor of Science in Commerce (BSC) nomenclature and told schools still using it to rename their programmes to BSBA.

Units side by side

The 36-unit General Education block in both orders follows CHED Memorandum Order No. 20, series of 2013. Both curricula are also described as vertically aligned with the Accounting, Business and Management (ABM) strand of senior high school. Neither order bars students from other strands: CMO No. 17 tells schools to offer bridging courses for students who did not take ABM so they end up at par. If you are still choosing a strand, see our ABM strand guide.

What you actually take

The 24-unit BSBA core

CMO No. 17 prescribes the same eight subjects for every BSBA student regardless of major: Basic Microeconomics, Business Law (Obligations and Contracts), Taxation (Income Taxation), Good Governance and Social Responsibility, Human Resource Management, International Business and Trade, Business Research, and a Thesis or Feasibility Study. Three units each.

On top of that sits a 24-unit Professional Major. Under Human Resource Management, for example, the order lists Administrative and Office Management, Labor Law and Legislation, Recruitment and Selection, Training and Development, Compensation Administration, Labor Relations and Negotiations, Special Topics in Human Resource Management, and Organizational Development.

The five majors CMO No. 17 names are Human Resource Management, Marketing Management, Financial Management, Operations Management and Business Economics. Schools can petition CHED for others as long as the core and major unit minimums are met, which is why you will see majors on school websites that are not on that list of five. One of the common ones has its own guide here: BSBA Financial Management.

The 49-unit Entrepreneurship core

CMO No. 18 loads far more units into the discipline core and much less into a "major". The required core runs to fifteen courses including Entrepreneurial Behavior, Opportunity Seeking, Business Plan Preparation, Market Research and Consumer Behavior, Microeconomics, Business Law and Taxation with focus on laws affecting micro, small and medium enterprises, Financial Management, International Business and Trade, Human Resource Management, Pricing and Costing, Innovation Management, Social Entrepreneurship, and Programs and Policies on Enterprise Development.

Two of those carry laboratory hours and five units each: Business Plan Implementation I (product development and market analysis) and Business Plan Implementation II. That is where the programme stops being a classroom subject.

The 12-unit Specialized Track is not a major in the BSBA sense. CMO No. 18 describes it as letting the student pursue a business project based on the resources and economic environment of their own region, and gives agribusiness, fisheries, tourism business, hospitality and culinary as examples. Your track follows your business idea, not a department.

The single biggest structural difference

BSBA ends with an internship. BS Entrepreneurship ends with a business.

CMO No. 17 puts a 6-unit, 600-hour internship in the BSBA curriculum. You are placed with an organisation and you work there.

CMO No. 18 prescribes no internship. Instead it requires the school itself to run a business incubator. The order calls business incubation the core requirement of a BS Entrepreneurship programme, and requires the school to maintain an incubation facility large enough to seat at least ten percent of its graduating class at any given time, supervised by faculty.

This has a practical consequence when you are picking a school. A BS Entrepreneurship programme without a working incubation facility is not compliant with the CMO it operates under. When you tour a campus, ask to see the incubator and ask what businesses current students are running out of it. If the answer is vague, that tells you something the tuition table will not.

Neither one has a board exam

Neither BSBA nor BS Entrepreneurship leads to a Professional Regulation Commission licensure examination. There is no "entrepreneurship board exam" and no "business administration board exam".

This matters more than students expect, because a large slice of Philippine business enrolment does lead to a licence. BS Accountancy leads to the CPA Licensure Examination; real estate management and customs administration connect to their own regulated professions. If a licence is part of what you want out of a degree, you are choosing a different programme entirely, not a different major. Our list of courses with board exams sets out which ones do.

The absence of a board exam is not a downside on its own. It does mean nobody outside your school and your employers is checking your competence, so the school you pick and the work you produce carry more weight.

How to choose

Pick BSBA if:

• You expect to work inside a company, at least at first, and want a functional specialisation on your transcript.
• You want the 600-hour internship, because it is a real credential and often a first job.
• You are not sure yet. BSBA keeps HR, marketing, finance, operations and economics all in view for the first two years.
• You want the option to shift into a related business programme later without losing a year. The 6-unit common business and management block is shared across the business cluster, which helps.

Pick BS Entrepreneurship if:

• You have a business, or a family business, or a specific idea, and you want four years of school pointed at it.
• You would rather be graded on a business that runs than on a thesis about one.
• The school you are looking at has a genuinely working incubator and faculty who have operated businesses.
• Your target track fits the local economy where you plan to stay. The Specialized Track is explicitly regional in design.

A caution on the popular framing. "Entrepreneurship is for people who want to be their own boss" is not a useful decision rule. Plenty of BSBA graduates start businesses, and plenty of Entrepreneurship graduates take jobs. What actually differs is the four years: one gives you a functional major and 600 hours inside an organisation, the other gives you a business plan you had to implement. Choose on what you want to have practised.

Where schools differ, and what to ask your registrar

CHED sets a floor, not a ceiling, so the same degree looks different across campuses. Things you should check with the specific school rather than assume:

• Total units. Many schools run above the CHED minimum. Ask for the curriculum checklist, not the brochure.
• Majors offered. A school may offer majors beyond the five in CMO No. 17 under CHED approval. Ask which majors have actually been running, not which are listed.
• The incubator. For entrepreneurship, ask where it is, who supervises it, and how many student businesses are operating.
• Internship placement. For BSBA, ask who arranges the 600 hours and which companies took last year's batch.
• Thesis or feasibility study. CMO No. 17 lets the school choose between the two for the 3-unit requirement. Which one your school runs changes your fourth year considerably.
• Shifting rules. Moving between BSBA and Entrepreneurship after first year is common. How many units carry over is a school decision, so ask before you enrol, not after.

If you are weighing the wider business cluster rather than just these two, our roundup of business courses in the Philippines maps the whole set and the memorandum order behind each.

Sources

• Commission on Higher Education, CHED Memorandum Order No. 17, series of 2017, Revised Policies, Standards and Guidelines for the Bachelor of Science in Business Administration — https://legacy.ched.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/CMO-17-s-2017.pdf
• Commission on Higher Education, CHED Memorandum Order No. 18, series of 2017, Revised Policies, Standards and Guidelines for the Bachelor of Science in Entrepreneurship — https://legacy.ched.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/CMO-18-s-2017.pdf
• Commission on Higher Education, 2017 CHED Memorandum Orders (index of issuances) — https://legacy.ched.gov.ph/2017-ched-memorandum-orders/
• Commission on Higher Education, CHED Memorandum Order No. 27, series of 2017, Revised Policies, Standards and Guidelines for Bachelor of Science in Accountancy — https://legacy.ched.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/CMO-27-s-2017.pdf