Entrepreneurship Education and Students’ Entrepreneurial Intention in Higher Education

Abstract

Facing the challenging employment situation and the changing labor market, developing student entrepreneurial intention has attracted significant policy consideration in China. This study describes the background of entrepreneurship education in China’s higher education institutes and explores the influences of entrepreneurship education on student entrepreneurial intention. Using data from a survey on students in China, this study finds that students in different types of institutions and different major fields had a different level of engagement in entrepreneurship education. Further, the higher the level of entrepreneurship education the students received, the stronger their self-efficacy of entrepreneurial decision-making was, and the stronger their entrepreneurial intention was. Student entrepreneurial decision-making self-efficacy played a mediating role between entrepreneurship education and student entrepreneurial intention. We found that entrepreneurship education has a positive effect on entrepreneurial intention. Entrepreneurship education course-taking has a positive effect on entrepreneurial decision-making. Furthermore, the positive effect of self-efficacy of entrepreneurial decision-making on entrepreneurial intention was also confirmed. We also found that self-efficacy of entrepreneurial decision-making played the significant role of mediator between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention. The findings also showed a difference between the current China context and the western context that taking entrepreneurship-related classes had more considerable influences on student entrepreneurial intention than entrepreneurship-related practicum. We discuss the implications of the improvement of higher education in China and relevance to other contexts.