Assessing the influence of Entrepreneurship Education on Entrepreneurial intentions if Undergraduate Students: A Case Study of The Malawi Polytechnic

Abstract

Entrepreneurship has become one of the fastest growing disciplines in the last two decades. Subsequently, entrepreneurship courses have been mushrooming in most universities all over the world. The Malawi Polytechnic, a constituent college of the University of Malawi, offers entrepreneurship courses to Bachelor of Business Administration and Bachelor of Education (Business Studies) students. The courses run for one semester during which students are subjected to teaching and learning whose main objective is to transform their minds from just being job seekers to job creators. This study was aimed at assessing the influence of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intentions of undergraduate students at the Malawi Polytechnic. The Theory of Planned Behavior and gender formed a part of the conceptual framework. Employing a survey design and using purposive sampling, a total of 160 students participated in the study sampled from four programs namely Bachelor of Business Administration, Bachelor of Education (Business Studies), Bachelor of Science (Technical Education) and Bachelor of Science in Engineering. Data was obtained through a questionnaire and analyzed using IBM SPSS statistics version 20.0 employing Spearman’s rank correlation, Z-test for comparing column proportions and independent sample T-test. The findings of the study show that students’ entrepreneurial intentions are high and that entrepreneurship education does influence students’ entrepreneurial intentions. All the three antecedents from the theory of planned behaviour were found to be related to entrepreneurial intentions. However, it was also found that students who participated in entrepreneurship courses intend to establish their businesses later than five years after graduation unlike those who did not participate in any entrepreneurship course who intend to establish their businesses in the first five years after graduation although the difference in proportions was not statistically significant. The study, therefore, recommends that entrepreneurship education should be offered to all students regardless of their program of study, with teaching and learning of it being experiential. Further, content of entrepreneurship courses should incorporate those topics that are going to strengthen students’ attitudes and perceptions of their ability to take on an entrepreneurship career with equal focus on both males and females.