Impact of the Entrepreneurship Education on Entrepreneurial Intention of the University Undergraduates

Abstract

Entrepreneurship Education can be highly regarded as one of the most preferred areas in the modern world where people access. The importance of Entrepreneurship Education is that it not only helps people to generate a new opportunity in the business world, but also helps the society to address the issue of unemployment. It was observed that the rate of unemployment among high schools and university graduates remains proportionally higher than the rate of less-educated workers in Sri Lanka. This study was conducted with the purpose of assessing the impact of the Entrepreneurship Education on Entrepreneurial Intention of the university undergraduates of University of Kelaniya. Main question addressed in the study is whether the Entrepreneurship education which is provided for the undergraduates is really having an impact on the entrepreneurial intention of them. The theory that was used is the theory of planned behavior. Most of the previous studies expressed that entrepreneurship education has an impact on developing entrepreneurial intention while few studies showed that there is a negative impact. 150 students who at least studied entrepreneurship once as a subject for his or her degree were taken into consideration as the sample of the study. Data was collected by means of a structured questionnaire and was analyzed using SPSS. Further, the regression analysis was used to test the hypothesis. It was observed that there is a positive relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention. However, gender has weakened the impact of this relationship as a moderating variable. Therefore, the result of the analysis shows that only few entrepreneurship students intend to pursue entrepreneurship immediately after graduation and some intend to utilize entrepreneurial knowledge to improve the paths in their existing organizations and establish a financial stability before entering in to their own business. This study attempts to measure that impact in terms of the Sri Lankan context and fill the gap of the existing literature with relevant to the Entrepreneurship field. Further, it is also recommended for the future researchers to obtain data from both state and private universities in order to get an overall, comprehensive view