It Is All About Creating New Firms? The Impact of the Entrepreneurial University on Employment Intentions of Stem Students

While research on the Entrepreneurial University has largely focused on how it supports venture creation of STEM students, the entrepreneurial capabilities and attitudes engineers and scientists acquire at university are crucial in wage-payed jobs too. However, we do not know much on how universities prepares the next generation of STEM graduates to respond to these challenges. To address this gap, this paper explores to what extent university support towards entrepreneurship in terms of entrepreneurial learning and climate contributes to STEM students’ career choices to work for SMEs vs. large firms and how such influence is moderated by students’ exposure to entrepreneurship in their family. Using a dataset of 44,686 STEM students, we find that entrepreneurial learning is negatively associated to the intention to work for a SME and that this effect is even more pronounced for students whose parents are entrepreneurs.