Entrepreneurship Education and Entrepreneurial Intentions: An Exploratory Study of Management and Pure Science Students in Lagos State University, Nigeria

Abstract

This study is a comparative evaluation of the relevance of Entrepreneurship Education (EE) on Entrepreneurial Intentions (EI) amongst Management Sciences and Pure Sciences students in Lagos State University (LASU), Nigeria. The study utilized a questionnaire adapted from Maresch (2015) as data collection instrument. 395 copies of questionnaires were administered to the students in the Departments of Business Administration and Biochemistry, 307 copies were retrieved and subsequently used for the analysis. The study employed Cronbach Alpha to ascertain the internal consistency of the data and the findings in the table revealed that all the variables employed in the study have reliability values that are greater than 0.70.This implying that the data are valid to achieve the objectives of the study. Data generated were analyzed by means of descriptive statistics, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and simple regression analysis for testing the three main hypotheses. The results revealed that LASU management students are better exposed to EE than their science counterparts. The findings also revealed a higher significant difference between entrepreneurship education and Management students’ attitudes and subjective norms, however, the perceived behaviourial intentions of science students were higher than that of Management students. This may not be unconnected to the fact that science students who had higher exposure to experiments and practicals over the years formed the belief that they were in control of their actions. The study concluded that EE significantly affected EI. The study therefore suggested that the university management should strengthen the EE process by providing more of practical supports for teaching entrepreneurship including competent human resource, provision of facilities and formulation of polices that will stimulate and sustain entrepreneurship culture in the university environment.