It Is All About Creating New Firms? A Broader Look at the Impact of the Entrepreneurial University on STEM student

While research on the Entrepreneurial University has largely focused on how it supports venture creation of STEM students, its contribution to youth employment and society might be much broader, since the entrepreneurial capabilities and attitudes engineers and scientists acquire at university are crucial in wage-payed jobs too. However, even though to stay competitive SMEs and incumbent firms needs employees with a combination of technical and commercial skills predisposed to act entrepreneurially, 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. To tackle these research questions, we build on social cognitive career theory and use survey data obtained from a sample 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. Besides contributing to research on the Entrepreneurial University, our findings will offer practical implications for STEM faculties, students and graduates, employers and HR managers.