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Brown University is the hot Ivy-League school these days, thanks in no small part to a list of celebrity kids who have strolled the campus. John F. Kennedy Jr. is a Brown alum, as are George Harrison's son, Ringo Starr's stepdaughter, and Prince Feisal of Jordan. But Brown is hot for another reason: In an economy where entrepreneurs are heroes, Brown has turned out some of the top young entrepreneurs in the United States. The founders of CDNow, Motley Fool, and Nantucket Nectars, along with dozens of other startups, all got their degrees from what is fast becoming Startup U.

Why do so many of Brown's students see green? The curriculum has a lot to do with it. Brown has no universitywide course requirements. (That policy, which is still called the "new curriculum," began in the 1970s.) Students do have to complete a prescribed course of study within their major, but what they do apart from that is entirely up to them. If they want to take 20 music classes or avoid math altogether, they can.

The move to the new curriculum was meant to inspire students to take risks, to inject more creativity into their lives. Maybe that's why so many Brown grads are also in entertainment. Lisa Loeb, Duncan Sheik, and NPR's Ira Glass are a few of the Brown alums who work in music and other media.

Being a business executive, on the other hand, has never been high on the list of goals for Brown's grads. "It wasn't seen as very cool," says Leon Richter, 28, who graduated in 1992. "The sense was that anyone could get a job on Wall Street. Feeding your soul was always considered more important than feeding your wallet."

Thanks to a class that Richter took, he learned that running his own company could provide that nourishment. Richter had enrolled in one of Professor Barrett Hazeltine's famous courses. The two most popular are "Management of Industrial and Nonprofit Organizations" and "Managerial Decision Making." The courses don't sound sexy, and they're hard to find: They're listed under engineering at a school renowned for its liberal-arts education. But it's impossible to spend time at Brown and not be aware of Hazeltine's courses.

"Before I ever set foot on campus as a freshman, I was told to seek him out," says Tom Scott, 33, who cofounded juice maker Nantucket Nectars with a fellow Brown alum. (Nantucket Nectars prints messages on the inside of its bottle caps. One reads, "Professor Hazeltine was one of Tom Scott's favorite professors at Brown.")

What makes Hazeltine's courses special? Using some of Harvard Business School's best case studies gives his classes a dose of the real world. "The entrepreneurs we read about were ordinary people in extraordinary situations," Scott says. "That made being an adult seem like it was not that big of a deal."

And Hazeltine himself, though 67, exudes the unbridled energy of the kids he teaches. If part of entrepreneurial success is maintaining passion and commitment, then Hazeltine is a living example. "He runs up and down the aisles," says Amy Nye Wolf, 31, who graduated in 1990 and is the founder of altiTUNES Partners, a chain of music stores located in airports and train stations. "He's interested in hearing your perspective as a consumer and in drawing on your instincts." Adds Seth Goldberger, 23, who, before graduating from Brown this spring, launched a company called Lauan Records: "I thought that he [Hazeltine] would laugh at my ideas, but he has this amazing ability to make everyone believe in themselves."