Just a couple of years after intensifying efforts to reach out to young entrepreneurs, Cal State San Bernardino has been recognized as having one of the top 100 programs in the country.

Entrepreneur magazine has included the university, with its Inland Empire Center for Entrepreneurship, in rankings featured in its May issue. Other Cal State campuses to receive similar recognition include San Diego and Fresno.

"This is a pretty rigorous ranking," said Michael Stull, director of the entrepreneurship center. "It is not something where they go by reputation and word of mouth."

The study was conducted for the magazine by Santa Barbara-based TechKnowledge Point Corp., which researched more than 825 programs and curricula last fall. Criteria included course offerings, faculty, outreach to the local business community and the number and quality of businesses started by students.

Schools that received the recognition were divided into national and regional categories, with Cal State San Bernardino falling into the latter category. The university was placed in the third of four tiers, meaning it ranked somewhere between 27th and 39th overall, Stull said. Other schools in the tier included UC Irvine, South Carolina's Clemson University, Georgia State University in Atlanta, Tulane University in New Orleans, and the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla.

Sundip R. Doshi, chief executive of Surado Solutions in Riverside, said he wishes such a program had been available at Cal State San Bernardino when he was a student there. A 1990 graduate in computer science, Doshi said he learned much of what he knows about running a business after he left the classroom.

"The (computer-science) major itself does not prepare you for entrepreneurship; it prepares you for the technical side," Doshi said. "You can be great on the technical side, but you have to understand marketing and business development."

Doshi said he learned much of what he knows about funding, cash flow and management while observing the chief financial officer at his family's large department store in Malaysia. He also worked for five years for another company, eventually becoming an executive vice president, before starting his own firm.

"I was fortunate I was able to get some of that (information) from my family," Doshi said. "If I had started this business right out of college, it would have been a mess for me."

Winning such an award by 2006 was one of the goals set for the 5-year-old entrepreneurship program when Stull joined it about two years ago. Such recognition could help the school compete for students against other local institutions such as UC Riverside, Cal Poly Pomona or California Baptist University in Riverside.

"It's a validation that what we're doing is worthwhile," he said. "Once you start to generate awareness and momentum, people notice."

Doshi, who now serves on the entrepreneurship center's board of directors, frequently speaks to its students and to computer-science majors. He and Stull both said they are careful to point out to students that there is a difference between being in business and being an entrepreneur.

"One of the biggest things is having the guts to take the leap," Doshi said. "A lot of it is instinct. At the end of the day, when you have to make a decision, it's a gut thing."