Entrepreneurship Education and Student Entrepreneurial Mindset: A Study of Students in Federal Government Tertiary Institutions in Lagos, Nigeria

Abstract

Entrepreneurship education is designed as an intervention programme for Nigerian Tertiary Institutions to nurture students towards developing a job creating mind-set as opposed to a job-seeking mind-set. The actualization of this broad objective for entrepreneurship education has been a subject of great interest, debate and conjecture in the last one decade due to several conflicting outcomes in the literature. Consequently, it becomes imperative to investigate the influence of entrepreneurship education on the mind-sets of students using different research locations and contexts within the Nigerian Tertiary Educational System. This research was thus designed to examine the extent to which entrepreneurship education influences the development of entrepreneurial mind-sets among students in two tertiary institutions in Lagos. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to present the basic demographics and test the study's hypotheses respectively. The findings suggest that entrepreneurship education has significant influence on students' entrepreneurial mind-set. Furthermore, positive and significant associations were also found between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention, capacities and competencies of these students. The paper makes a significant contribution to further increase the understanding of the potentials inherent in the entrepreneurship education programme being offered in Nigerian tertiary institutions thus underscoring its importance in empowering students towards future self-reliance. Furthermore, producing graduates with an entrenched entrepreneurial mind-set which would drive innovation first in firms that would employed them and also lead to increase in start-ups amongst graduates from Nigerian Universities. The study thus recommends a redesign of the entrepreneurship programme to foster the growth and nurturing of the intensity of students entrepreneurial mind-set towards job creation and innovativeness.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship Education, Entrepreneurial Mindset, Tertiary Institutions, Entrepreneurship Capacities, Entrepreneurial Competencies, Innovativeness