Enterprise education: influencing students' perceptions of entrepreneurship.

This research examines the effect of participation in an enterprise education program on perceptions of the desirability and feasibility of starting a business. Changes in the perceptions of a sample of secondary school students enrolled in the Young Achievement Australia (YAA) enterprise program are analysed using a pre-test post-test control group research design. After completing the enterprise program, participants reported significantly higher perceptions of both desirability and feasibility. The degree of change in perceptions is related to the positiveness of prior experience and to the positiveness of the experience in the enterprise education program. Self-efficacy theory is used to explain the impact of the program. Overall, the study provides empirical evidence to support including exposure to entrepreneurship education as an additional exposure variable in entrepreneurial intentions models.

Introduction

Early research on the factors that influence the decision to start a new business focused on trait or personality characteristics of individuals (Brockhaus, 1980; 1982; McClelland, 1961). Models were also developed of the entrepreneurial process that incorporated behavioral and situational factors (Gartner, 1985; Van de Ven, Hudson, & Schroeder, 1984). More recently, intentions models (Bird, 1988; Boyd & Vozikis, 1994; Shapero, 1975; Shapero & Sokol, 1982) that focus on attitudes and their antecedents have been proposed to better explain the entrepreneurship process. For example, Davidsson (1995) related personal variables including age, gender, education, vicarious experience and experiences of change to a variety of attitudes that influenced conviction and entrepreneurial intentions.

Despite the recognition that education and prior entrepreneurial experiences influence people's attitudes towards starting their own business, the impact of entrepreneurship or enterprise education, as distinct from general education, on attitudes or perceptions of entrepreneurship has remained relatively untested (Donckels, 1991; Krueger & Brazeal, 1994). University-based entrepreneurship curricula have attracted the bulk of research within the area of entrepreneurship education (Gorman, Hanlon, & King, 1997; Young, 1997) leaving a gap in the literature pertaining to pre-university entrepreneurship and enterprise programs. However, entrepreneurship development in primary and secondary schools has received growing attention (Donckels, 1991; Gasse, 1985; Kourilsky, 1995) because students have expressed a desire to participate in entrepreneurship education programs. It is believed that the ideal stage to acquire basic knowledge about entrepreneurship and to foster a positive attitude towards entrepreneurship is during childhood and adolescence years (Filion, 1994; Gasse, 1985).

Although the alleged benefits of entrepreneurship education have been much extolled by researchers and educators, there has been little rigorous research on its effects. In 1986, Dainow reviewed ten years of entrepreneurship education literature and concluded that researchers need to systematically collect and analyse data and adopt more varied methodologies. The Gorman et al. (1997) review of literature pertaining to entrepreneurship, enterprise and small business education indicates that more rigorous studies are still required. Their review includes numerous references to research that assume a causal relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial behavior. However, few researchers attempted to measure the influence of education (Gorman et al., 1997). At the present time, it is evident that the question of whether education, be it general or focus on enterprise, can influence entrepreneurial perceptions, requires further research (Donckels, 1991; Kantor, 1988; Krueger & Brazeal, 1994; McMullan, Chrisman, & Vesper, 2002). Ideally, researchers need to develop credible methods of testing preconceived hypotheses, using control groups, large sample sizes, and conducting long-term studies for example. Descriptive or retrospective techniques are not likely to provide convincing evidence that entrepreneurship can be influenced by educational programs (Alberti, 1999, Gorman et al., 1997; Matthews & Moser, 1996). There is opportunity to test what has remained relatively untested, and consequently, move the field beyond its exploratory stage (Alberti, 1999).

The purpose of this article is to study the effect of enterprise education on perceptions of entrepreneurship in adolescents. More specifically it questions what effect participation by high school students in an enterprise education program has on perceptions of the feasibility and desirability of starting a business.

Intentions Models

A variety of intentions models have been developed by previous researchers. These include the model proposed by Bird (1988) and developed by Boyd and Vozikis (1994), the Shapero (1975; Shapero & Sokol, 1982) model tested by Krueger (1993), and the Davidsson (1995) variation, which was extended and applied by Autio et al. (1997) to the university situation. Dominant models of entrepreneurial intentions are largely homologous in that they all focus on the pre-entrepreneurial event and integrate attitude and behavior theory (Ajzen, 1991), and self-efficacy and social learning theory (Bandura, 1986). Additionally, the models include exogenous factors, environmental factors, volitional elements and the influence of supportive environments, suggesting that these factors contribute to the coalescing of entrepreneurial attitudes and intentions. There appears to be little difference in the proportion of variation in intentions explained using different approaches (Krueger, Reilly, & Carsrud, 2000). This article will examine the effect of enterprise education on perceptions using the Shapero model.

Shapero's (1975; Shapero & Sokol, 1982) model hypothesises that a person's intent to start a business is influenced by perceived desirability, perceived feasibility, and propensity to act. Shapero assumes that people are motivated by displacement, which could be either positive or negative. People's resulting behavior, Shapero posits, will depend on their propensity to act and the relative credibility of alternative behaviors (Shapero, 1985). Perceived desirability, perceived feasibility and propensity to act are presented as direct antecedents to entrepreneurial intentions. Shapero suggests that a person's attitude towards entrepreneurship would be indirectly influenced by his or her prior exposure to entrepreneurship, through prior work experience and the existence of role models. Krueger (1993) tested this model, incorporating breadth and positiveness of prior experience to capture prior exposure to entrepreneurship.

In this study, participation in an enterprise program is incorporated in Shapero's (1975; Shapero & Sokol, 1982) model to determine its impact on the perceived desirability and perceived feasibility of starting a business.

Education and Perceptions of Entrepreneurship

Some early researchers hypothesized that entrepreneurs are less well educated than the general population (Jacobowitz & Vilder, 1982). More recent evidence suggests that people who start businesses have a higher level of education than people who do not (Bates, 1995; Bowen & Hisrich, 1986). In particular, the study of census data (Robinson & Sexton, 1994) provides convincing evidence that business owners are more highly educated than the general public. Despite the relationship demonstrated between level of education and business ownership, it has been argued that formal education in general does not encourage entrepreneurship. Rather, it prepares students for the corporate domain (Timmons, 1994), promotes a "take-a-job" mentality (Kourilsky, 1995) and suppresses creativity and entrepreneurship (Chamard, 1989; Plaschka & Welsch, 1990).

To foster entrepreneurship, specialised courses have become increasingly common in tertiary institutions (Solomon & Fernald, 1991) and enterprise education has been promoted to encourage entrepreneurial behavior (Donckels, 1991; Gasse, 1985). Reviews of the literature on enterprise and entrepreneurship education (Dainow, 1986; Gorman, 1997) and of particular entrepreneurship support programs (McMullan et al., 2002) provide some evidence that these programs are successful in encouraging entrepreneurs to start businesses, or improve the performance of businesses. However, as the reviews state, the studies tend to have methodological limitations in that in general they do not measure pre- and post-test, and also lack control groups. Moreover, the purpose and evaluation of these programs need to be carefully considered, as the commonly used subjective participant satisfaction measures are not correlated with objective measures of subsequent venture performance (McMullan, Chrisman, & Vesper, 2001).

This study focuses on an enterprise education program and its effect on perceptions of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship and enterprise education programs that are described as best practice, such as Mini Society, Youth Empowerment and Self-Sufficiency and Youth Achievement Australia (Breen, 1999; Kourilsky & Carlson, 1996), have similar characteristics and incorporate interactive learning, experience-based learning, role models and community and business links. The likely effect of this type of education on perceptions of entrepreneurship can be explained through theories of social learning and self-efficacy.