Among other issues, the report said, Princeton had allotted “only 1,500 square feet” for student incubator and accelerator programs, “whereasCornell has 364,000; Penn 200,000; Berkeley 108,000; Harvard 30,000; Stanford 12,000; Yale 7,700; N.Y.U. 6,000; and Columbia 5,000.”

In November, Princeton celebrated the opening of a 10,000-square-footEntrepreneurial Hub near campus. The university is also starting a summer internship program in Manhattan so that students can spend time at young companies. Mung Chiang, the director of the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education at Princeton, said the university wanted to help students, faculty and alumni become more entrepreneurial in business, government and nonprofit work.

“It’s about broadening people’s mind-sets and capabilities,” Professor Chiang said.

The growth in campus entrepreneurship is clear, administrators say. In 1985, college campuses in the United States offered only about 250 courses in entrepreneurship, according to a recent report from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which finances entrepreneurship education and training. In 2013, more than 400,000 students were taking such courses.

The prospect of starting the next Snapchat or Instagram is one attraction for students. But in a tight job market, where young adults say they expect to change employers every few years, some undergraduates are signing up for start-up training in the hope of acquiring self-employment skills.

“To be honest, our generation is no longer interested in doing one thing for the rest of our lives,” said Mijin Han, a senior at Rice with an English major and a business minor focused on entrepreneurship. “Our generation is interested in learning different things, and if the environment does not provide it, we want to jump out and take a risk.”

Some of that spirit was on display at Rice in October. In an engineering department design lab, teams of students in the university’s global health technologies program were working on assignments to develop products for real clients — many of them for hospitals in Malawi, in southeastern Africa, seeking low-cost medical devices.

Across campus, a popular lunch spot was hosting a touring start-up event— financed by Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and a frequent guest on the start-up reality show “Shark Tank” — that brings executives at young companies to network with students. At a nearby table, faculty members handed out cards to students that provided links to Rice’s entrepreneurship resources and emblazoned with start-up slogans: “Be a disrupter.” “Find your co-founder.” “What is your moonshot?”

To support the programs, colleges and universities are raising money and seeking mentors among successful alumni and local business leaders. Some provide stipends for students participating in accelerator programs or offer seed capital for their start-ups; others may negotiate revenue-sharing arrangements if graduate students want to commercialize ideas developed in university labs.

N.Y.U.’s 5,900-square-foot lab is financed by a multimillion-dollar gift from Mark Leslie, a university trustee who was the founder and chief executive of Veritas Software, and his wife, Debra. With plate glass windows overlooking Washington Place in Manhattan, the Leslie eLabprovides space for budding entrepreneurs to network, attend events and make prototypes of their products.

“I know a few students who visited the eLab and saw the buzz and the resources we have available and said this was a critical factor in their decision to attend N.Y.U.,” said Frank Rimalovski, the executive director of the N.Y.U Entrepreneurial Institute, which oversees the lab.

Yet the quick start-up workshops offered on some campuses can seem at odds with the traditional premise of liberal arts schools to educate deliberative, critical thinkers.

“Real innovation is rooted in knowledge and durable concern and interest, not just ‘I thought of something that nobody ever thought of before,’” saidJonathan Jacobs, who writes frequently about liberal education and is the chairman of the philosophy department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of The City University of New York. “That’s not educating people, frankly.”

And at least a few professors of entrepreneurship say that some universities are not ensuring that students learn the fundamentals of starting, running and sustaining a business.

“Just because you have a nice space and a laundry list of entrepreneurship activities doesn’t mean there is an effective story around that program, or that students know how to navigate their way around those resources,” said Heidi Neck, a professor of entrepreneurial studies at Babson College, a business school in Wellesley, Mass.

That is one reason Rice administrators say they are consolidating and analyzing current programs before embarking on additional efforts. As part of that process, the university introduced an interdisciplinary forum last month to promote campus research, discussion and broader courses in entrepreneurship.

Mr. Leebron, Rice’s president, described the initiative as part of an effort to improve the hands-on, project-based learning students are requesting.

“There’s no question that more people at the age of 18 are coming to universities saying, ‘I have an idea; I think I can have an impact,’” he said. “What are we going to do with these folks? How are we going to support them?”