Investigating barriers to enhance entrepreneurship in agricultural higher education from the perspective of graduate students

Abstract

Nowadays, the concept of entrepreneurship will be given special importance, so that considered as the engine of economy and culture change. Development of entrepreneurial culture and support for entrepreneurs and job creation in the agricultural sector seems to be necessary. This necessity, in agricultural higher education that its duty is to provide human specialist resources is more. The purpose of this study was investigating barriers to enhance entrepreneurship in the Agricultural higher education. A descriptive–correlation survey approach was used in this study. The population consisted of agricultural graduated students in agricultural faculty of Zanjan University (n=100). The main tool of this research was the questionnaire contains five sections that were developed by researchers. Data collected were analyzed using the software Excel and SPSS version 16. The esults showed that lack of adequate government support, limited financial ability to provide graduates employment arrangements in the agricultural sector and lack of efficiency in universities to educate entrepreneur graduate are the main barriers to employment of agricultural graduates. By factor analysis, factors for barriers to enhance entrepreneurship in the agricultural higher education were reduced to five main factors. These five factors in order of importance include: unsuitable selection and training methods, inappropriate content and educational planning, communication barriers, lack of entrepreneurial training courses and books on agriculture and poor assessment and instructional programs, which in total have been able to 53.44 percent of the variance in barriers to strengthen entrepreneurship in the agricultural colleges.