Entrepreneurship Education as a Catalyst of Business Start-Ups: A Study on Malaysian Community College Students

Abstract

This study investigates the effect of entrepreneurship education on the Malaysian community college students' inclination towards entrepreneurship. It is built on the previous study by Ooi (2008) which examined the university students' inclination towards entrepreneurship. A sample consisting of 235 students were drawn from four community colleges located in the Malaysian northern region. The students were in the final year of their diploma studies in various disciplines. A survey questionnaire was employed to elicit responses concerning their entrepreneurship inclination and characteristics. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse respondents' characteristics and Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modelling (SEM-PLS) was employed in determining the relationship among the variables of the study. The results of the study indicated that 51 per cent of the community college students would consider commencing a business as their future vocation, whilst 33 per cent stated that they are probably to start a new business venture after completion of their studies. This could be attributed to the effort taken by the community colleges in promoting entrepreneurship among students. The entrepreneurial factors: role models and the role played by the community colleges in promoting entrepreneurship showed a statistically significant positive influence on community college students' decision to pursue an entrepreneurial career. The Partial Least Square -Multi Group Analysis (PLS-MGA) employed for moderating the personal background variables indicated no significant differences on path coefficients between the various groups across gender and working experience. An exception was the effect of role models on entrepreneurial inclination, which was significantly higher with those participants without working experience. Recommendations and future research direction are delivered in relation to the findings of this study.

Relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial goal intentions: psychological traits as mediators

“…In testing hypothesis 1d, the results revealed that exposure to entrepreneurship education significantly, and in a positive way, accounted for some substantial variance in entrepreneurial goal intentions. The findings corroborate those from studies carried out in non-Western contexts which drew similar conclusions (Dabale & Masese, 2014;Ekpoh & Edet, 2011;Ooi & Nasiru, 2017;Sondari, 2014). The findings affirm the usefulness of entrepreneurial intention as an indicator of the effectiveness of entrepreneurial education programmes.…”

Entrepreneurship Education and Business Opportunity Exploitation: Positive Emotion as Mediator

“…Hence, exposure to entrepreneurship-oriented knowledge and experience can increase students' awareness of entrepreneurship, which is important given the increasing number of unemployed graduates each year. This is supported by Ooi & Nasiru (2015), who stated that uncertain global economic changes affect the provision of job opportunities, which are increasingly limited to graduates. Indirectly, the number of unemployed graduates will increase, and this situation requires them to be wiser in preparing themselves to compete in the globalization era.…”

A Systematic Review on Entrepreneurship Education in Higher Learning Institutions in Southeast Asia

“…Besides that, several studies measured entrepreneurial self-efficacy (Utami, 2017;Phie & Bagheri, 2013;Zainuddin & Ismail, 2011;Zainuddin & Rejab, 2010), self-regulation (Looi, 2018;Phie & Bagheri, 2013), entrepreneurial aspiration (Pihie, 2009), entrepreneurial knowledge (Ruswanti, 2016a), entrepreneurial skills (Hamzah et al, 2016), role model and role played by the community (Ooi & Nasiru, 2015) to predict the entrepreneurial intentions among students. Interestingly, there are five studies which proved that entrepreneurial self-efficacy (Darmanto et al, 2018;Shahverdi et al, 2018;Din et al, 2017) and entrepreneurial attitudes (Kusumojanto et al, 2017;Hutagalung, 2017) positively affect EE and entrepreneurial intention.…”