How to Educate Entrepreneurs?

Abstract

Entrepreneurship education has two effects: it improves students’ entrepreneurial skills and provides impetus to those suited to entrepreneurship while discouraging others. While entrepreneurship education helps students to make a vocational decision its effects may conflict for those unsuited to entrepreneurship. We show that vocational and skill formation effects of entrepreneurship education can be identified empirically using a structural equation model. While conflicting effects of vocational and skill directed course content are observed in some individuals, overall these types of content are complements. We discuss how our results extend recent research and provide implications for the design of entrepreneurship courses.