Entrepreneurship education: contingencies and paradoxes in entrepreneurial learning at universities

Despite the worldwide increase in entrepreneurship education offered at universities, so far researchers have not been able to clearly identify to what extent and under which conditions this type of education contributes to students’ entrepreneurial learning. Building on a human capital theory of learning, we hypothesise that the exposure to entrepreneurship education has an inverted U-shaped relationship with entrepreneurial learning. Initially students learning outcomes increase up to a certain threshold level, but after the saturation point, perceived learning decreases. We also argue that this relationship is moderated by the entrepreneurial experience of the founder, the teaching pedagogy applied at the university and the type of entrepreneurship in a specific country. Our findings resulting from a multi-level analysis on a cross-country sample of 87,961 students strongly confirm our hypotheses. Based on these findings, we formulate recommendations for researchers, educators and policy makers with respect to the design of entrepreneurial education programs and the analysis of its outcomes.