The impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention of engineering students

Abstract

Entrepreneurship education has become very popular nowadays both in management schools and engineering schools. However, the impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention of engineering students remains in question. What is the value of entrepreneurship education? What should be taught and how to teach the subject? In order to develop guidelines for entrepreneurship education for engineering students, this thesis aims to propose an entrepreneurship education model by empirically investigating how specific education components influence the entrepreneurial intention of engineering students. To achieve the aim, four objectives need to be addressed. The first one is to identify a theoretical approach and develop a conceptual model for studying the impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention of engineering students. The second one is to test the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education in terms of entrepreneurial intention. The third one is to empirically test the influence of education components on entrepreneurial intention. Finally, the fourth one is to develop an entrepreneurship education model and provide guidelines for entrepreneurship education. An extensive review on entrepreneurship and education was conducted in order to achieve the first objective. The theory of planned behavior (TPB) was found appropriate to be the theoretical basis of entrepreneurship education because it provides most information about the formation process of entrepreneurial intention at both personal and social level. Further, entrepreneurship is a planned behavior that a new business is seldom created suddenly without planning, and thus it is best predicted by entrepreneurial intention. The second objective was reached by a comparison study between entrepreneurship students and control group students. The third objective was achieved through testing the effect of specific education components on entrepreneurial intention. The fourth objective was achieved by exploring the results from the theoretical and practical perspectives. Based on the TPB and elaboration of entrepreneurship education into four components, a conceptual model linking entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention was proposed. Ten sets of hypotheses were formulated in the

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