Abstract:

The Nigerian universities have been teaching entrepreneurship courses with a view to imparting skills that will bring about creation of new ventures. The primary concern of this study was to examine how entrepreneurship education can develop human capital within struggling societies so as to empower the youths to be able to create their own technological advances and become proactive in improving their overall well-being. In this study, we evaluated the adequacy of entrepreneurship education given to Nigerian undergraduates to create and manage a new venture. Also, we examined the impact of entrepreneurship education on venture creation. Primary data were collected through the use of questionnaire and oral interview methods. One hundred and twenty science and engineering students and One hundred and twenty science and engineering graduates from twelve universities four federal universities, four Osun State universities and four private universities in Nigeria were purposively selected as respondents for the study. Findings show that the content of the entrepreneurship education is adequate for venture creation. Results of correlation analysis show that factors such as: relevance of entrepreneurship lectures; full knowledge of the entrepreneurship courses; adequacy of course duration and feasibility of the principles learned have significant and positive relationship with number of business opportunities identified by the graduates. There was no significant relationship between venture creation and content of entrepreneurship lectures given. We found that venture creation requires some other factors beside entrepreneurship education. The paper concludes that the Nigerian government still needs to do more in providing enabling environment and other factors that may be needed to translate the theoretical knowledge to practical venture creation.

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