The impact of entrepreneurship education on actual entrepreneurship intentions, practices and outcomes amongst students in a university of technology in the Western Cape

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to ascertain the extent to which entrepreneurial education influences students’ intention to pursue entrepreneurial endeavours or outcomes upon graduation, as opposed to becoming job seekers. The study essentially sought to determine the reason why entrepreneurship students in South Africa generally seek paid employment as opposed to their becoming entrepreneurs, having passed through entrepreneurship education; and whether the entrepreneurship education they received was adequate to push them toward entrepreneurial outcomes. The study adopted a mixed method approach to gather data from 136 randomly selected students in their third and fourth years of studies respectively, from a university of technology in South Africa. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) tool for data analysis was used in capturing and analysing the acquired data. It is interesting to note that the findings do not indicate any statistically significant gaps between the university’s entrepreneurship education and the students' entrepreneurial intent. However, it shows how factors such as family background (whether or not the students had an entrepreneurial role model in the family), work experience, fear of failure versus hope of success, etc., all have some influence on their entrepreneurial intentions. Further studies may explore some other factors that came up during the course of the study such as more of the participants who had entrepreneurial parents, or more having mothers in entrepreneurship than fathers. This may shed more light on how much this factor has influenced the students’ entrepreneurial intention. Further studies may also determine why there are more females interested in studying entrepreneurship than their male counterparts which can, perhaps, be linked to the reason why the students had more mothers as entrepreneurs compared to fathers.