University Students’ Entrepreneurial Intentions: Does Education Make a Difference?

Abstract

Recently critical questions have been raised about the impact of entrepreneurship education on developing entrepreneurial qualities and intentions of university students. The main purpose of this study is to explore the impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intentions of students using the theory of planned behaviour and social cognitive theory. The sample consisted of 348 Master students (171 with and 177 without entrepreneurship education) from the Faculty of Entrepreneurship, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature and School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Tehran, Iran. The data were collected using validated questionnaires. As hypothesized, the findings indicate that entrepreneurship education significantly improves entrepreneurial intentions of the students so that students who have undertaken entrepreneurship education have higher entrepreneurial attitude, entrepreneurial self-efficacy and intentions to become an entrepreneur than the students who have not undertaken entrepreneurship education. Furthermore, entrepreneurship education enhances students’ entrepreneurial intentions through significantly improving both their entrepreneurial attitude and entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Implications of the findings for entrepreneurship education and improvement of research standards at universities are discussed.