Detecting Hidden Sorting and Alignment Effects of Entrepreneurship Education

Who becomes an entrepreneur after university? Evidence from Canada

In recent decades there has been significant interest among policy makers in supporting entrepreneurship among university students, with the goal to improve labor market outcomes and contribute to the economy through venture creation. Drawing from the 2018 National Graduate Survey in Canada, our study examines who engages in entrepreneurial activity after graduation, investigating differences among demographic groups and between those who participated in entrepreneurship education on campus and those who did not participate. We find that those graduates who participated in entrepreneurship education are more likely to be self-employed and own their own business three years after graduating than the general population of university graduates. We also find differences according to gender, citizenship, and socio-economic status in entrepreneurial activity. Our results are consistent with previous studies documenting demographic disparities in entrepreneurship and provide more generalizable evidence about the relationship between entrepreneurship education and subsequent entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship Education at the Crossroads: Challenging Taken-for-Granted Assumptions and Opening New Perspectives

This work presents a synthesis of a debate regarding taken-for-granted assumptions and challenges in entrepreneurship education, matured after a developmental workshop organized to increase the research salience of the field. From the five contributions selected, three challenges emerge. The first is recognizing that participants’ representations about entrepreneurship play a crucial role in defining goals and impact of entrepreneurship education; second, integrating new perspectives of conceiving entrepreneurship into the current models of teaching entrepreneurship; and, lastly, facilitating the integration of entrepreneurship knowledge into practice. These challenges opened up to a conception of entrepreneurship education as a dynamic concept reflecting personal values, societal changes, and cultural differences. As a result, learning places of entrepreneurship education promotes exploration and not adaptation to existing schemes, where personal models for practicing entrepreneurship have room to emerge. Defining knowledge priorities, instead of targeting knowledge exhaustiveness, becomes of greatest importance to make entrepreneurship education‘s impact more relevant.