Entrepreneurship education: An assessment of its effect on entrepreneurial intensions (A case of public universities’ students in Ethiopia)

Entrepreneurship education programmes in universities are important to increase the inspiration and intention by the side of students to be self employed after graduation. Owing to its importance, several researchers continually call for more studies in the area, particularly those which try to investigate the effect of entrepreneurship education. The empirical gap in the context of our country Ethiopia is much. The basic purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intentions in the context of Ethiopian public higher institutions. To achieve this basic purpose, four research questions, four specific objectives and four hypotheses were put forward. In the endeavor of answering the research questions, achieving the objectives and testing the hypothesis; the study was designed as a crosssectional survey research. A multistage sampling design is employed to participate students from fourteen departments in five public Universities and from the distributed questionnaires, 404 from those who haven't taken the course and 418 from those who have taken the course are collected back resulting in a response rate of 82.2 percent. Based on Ajzen's (1991) theory of planned behavior, with the addition of entrepreneurial background, a research model was developed with entrepreneurial intention as a dependent variable; attitude towards entrepreneurship, perceived behavioral control as well as entrepreneurial background as independent variables and entrepreneurship education as mediating variable. Descriptive, correlation, regression as well as t-test analysis were employed in the analysis. The results of the questionnaire analysis indicated that the intention towards entrepreneurship among those students taking the course is higher than those who haven't taken the course. It follows then that entrepreneurship education can enhance entrepreneurial intention of students.