Addressing the paradox in entrepreneurial education's impacts

Abstract

Does entrepreneurship education matter? We answer this overarching question based on a recent empirical study of how such training impacts personal, firm-level, and societal outcomes over a wide range of organizations where it has been applied. The analysis provides a better understanding of the current contrast between entrepreneurial education's significant positive micro-level effects and its lack of significant effects at the macro-level (e.g., in national start-up rates). We base the results on a survey of students who graduated from formal entrepreneurship programs in the last decade; we ask them about their education, their individual entrepreneurial performance at whatever organizations they then contributed to, that organization's performance, and several other outcomes of interest to society (e.g., innovations). We find not only the usual contrast in micro- and macro-level effects, but also new results in between – i.e., at the organizational level where it appears educational benefits begin to dissipate. We then use these results to not only generate a set of relevant possible explanations, including a novel narrative for that current contrast based on a solid analogy, but also to propose several new recommendations to improve the outcomes studied.