Entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention among undergraduate students in Tertiary Institutions in southwest, Nigeria

Abstract

The objective of the paper is to determine the relationship between acquisition of entrepreneurship knowledge and entrepreneurial intention among undergraduate students in selected tertiary institutions in southwest, Nigeria. Multistage sampling technique was used to select all six universities currently running entrepreneurship as a programme in the Southwestern Nigeria; three polytechnics that are running entrepreneurship as part of their programmes were randomly selected for the study and stratified random technique used to select six hundred (600) final year students from the nine institutions. This sample size was determined by Godden (2004) formula for study population that is greater than fifty thousand respondents. Copies of structured questionnaire were used to collect the data from the respondents. Data were analyzed with the aid of descriptive statistics and correlation analysis to test the hypothesis. Findings show that entrepreneurship education with (r=0.294, p<0.05) has positive and significant correlation with student’s entrepreneurial intention. The implication is that entrepreneurship education is strong predictor of students' entrepreneurial intention. It was concluded that entrepreneurship education was panacea to entrepreneurial intention among the students of tertiary institutions. The study however recommends that curriculum of entrepreneurship education and even that of other courses should be reviewed to allow enough time for students to acquire required skills, to further increase their intentions and allow them to practice entrepreneurship.