The impact of entrepreneurship education on university students’ entrepreneurial skills: a family embeddedness perspective

To provide individuals with entrepreneurial skills and prepare them to engage in entrepreneurial activities, universities offer entrepreneurship education (EE) courses. However, the growing number of EE impact studies offers mixed and apparently contradictory results about the effects of such courses. The present study contributes to this literature by indicating the type of EE (elective vs. compulsory) and the characteristics of students’ exposure to an enterprising family as two complementary boundary conditions that contribute to explain the outcomes of EE. To do so, the paper takes advantage of quasi-experimental research on a sample of 427 university students who participated to two consecutive waves of the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey (GUESSS). The study finds that both types of EE contribute to students’ entrepreneurial skills; however, the impact of EE in compulsory courses is contingent on students’ perceptions of parents’ performance as entrepreneurs.