A longitudinal study on the influence of entrepreneurship education and family context on university students' venture creation

During the last decades, universities have increasingly been offering entrepreneurial courses and programmes, known as entrepreneurship education initiatives, to help students in developing skills and knowledge required to identify and act upon entrepreneurial opportunities. Given the substantial amount of resources allocated to these initiatives, assessing the outcomes of entrepreneurial education has attracted considerable attention by scholars; however, to date most studies have analysed the role of entrepreneurship education in generating entrepreneurial intentions, rather than actual behavior. Our study aims to address this gap by testing whether entrepreneurship education, and different types of courses – elective or mandatory – have an impact on students’ entrepreneurial competences and thus on their actual engagement into new venture creation process. Furthermore, we assess the influence of the family climate on this process. To do so we draw on longitudinal data from GUESSS, involving 1,316 students surveyed in both 2014 and 2016. Our results show that both elective and mandatory courses foster entrepreneurial behaviour by increasing entrepreneurial competences. Furthermore, the presence of a positive family climate towards entrepreneurship facilitates the competences acquisition process in case of elective courses more strongly than mandatory courses. This study contributes to the stream of research related to entrepreneurial education and extends studies about entrepreneurial behavior. Moreover, it has some practical implications for educators and academic institutions.