Entrepreneurship education impact and contingencies: a quasi-experimental design

Economic growth and innovation in our society are driven by the presence of individuals endowed with entrepreneurial skills who allow them to spur processes of knowledge spillover and commercialization. To equip individuals with entrepreneurial skills and prepare them to engage into entrepreneurial activities, universities offer entrepreneurship education (EE) courses. However, the growing number of EE impact studies offers mixed and apparently contradicting results about the results of such courses. Our study contributes to this literature by conceptualizing the type of EE (elective vs. compulsory) and the students’ exposure to family business as institutional and social boundary conditions that explain the heterogeneous outcomes observed by EE impact studies. To do so we take advantage of a quasi-experimental research and on a sample of 446 university students who have participated to two consecutive waves of the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey (GUESSS). While we find that both types of EE contribute to students’ entrepreneurial skills, their impact is contingent to several dimensions students’ exposure to family business (i.e., having self-employed parents, students’ perceptions of parents’ performance as entrepreneurs and working experience in the family firm). Additionally, we find that none of EE type is per se sufficient to induce students to engage in actual entrepreneurial behavior. Taken together, our results add further nuances on the conditions under which institutions create opportunities for individuals to acquire entrepreneurial skills.