In a study on the role of higher education skills and support in graduate self-employment in the U.K. Greene and Saridakis (2008) found firstly that the skills acquired through higher education (plus support from academics) were positively associated with graduate self- employment shortly after graduation, but that, secondly, this association is short-lived, i.e. four years after graduation there was no statistically significant evidence of association between self-employment and the skills or support acquired through higher education and only 29% of those graduates who were self-employed shortly after graduation were still self- employed four years later. The sample of graduates for this study was taken from a wide range of U.K. HE institutions and was large – over 4,000 individuals took part. But the study does not go as far as to provide a discussion on which particular skills from the HE experience help stimulate self-employment, nor does it include an analysis of why so many
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graduates cease being self-employed so soon after graduation. Nevertheless, the fact that self-employment is not viewed as a viable option for many graduates in the U.K. is confirmed by research undertaken by Mora and Vila (2010), who found that the U.K. and France shared the lowest rate of entrepreneurs among young graduates across a range of European countries. So despite the political will in the U.K. and investments in entrepreneurial teaching in the U.K. HE sector to aid self-employment among graduates, the current environment in the U.K. would seem to be not as conducive to entrepreneurship as in other European countries.
Education is one more factor cited in the literature as a potential influence on entrepreneurship. In the context of this research, education implies higher level learning, i.e. education at tertiary level. Two of the most famous ‘entrepreneurs’ of this era, Richard Branson and Bill Gates, either did not go to university or did not complete their course and Vance et al. (2012) speak of the popular idea of entrepreneurs as college dropouts. So, does higher education have an impact or not? Once again, education as a requirement for entrepreneurial activity is a contentious issue:
“Conclusions as to whether or not the attitudes and personality traits required for successful entrepreneurship can be transferred through learning are still open to debate” (Hood and Young, 1993 p117).
Caird (1993) discusses the Honey and Mumford measure of learning styles, which considers how people learn, either through reflection, theorizing, experimentation or action (Honey and Mumford 1986, cited in Caird, 1993) and concludes that, in tests using this measure on successful growth oriented small business owner-managers, they…
“…have activist and pragmatic learning styles. In other words, this test shows that entrepreneurs prefer to learn through action and experimentation rather than through theory and reflection” (p13).
One could argue that higher education in the U.K., despite changes in recent years in the way people learn (from learning by rote and with an emphasis on theoretical understanding to a more practical, vocational learning) still, by its very essence, obliges students to think and act in particular ways and puts albeit sometimes unintentional constraints on the way they learn – which is contrary to the free-thinking, risk-taking, creative nature of an entrepreneur. Vance et al. (2012) review the idea that higher education, and business and management programmes in particular, curbs, discourages and even stifles other forms of
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nonlinear thinking (see also Maines and Naughton, 2010; Grassl, 2010; Bennis and O’Toole, 2005; all cited in Vance et al.).
The converse of this argument is that an educational grounding is a requirement for entrepreneurial activity. Schultz (cited in Chell et al., 1991) contended that education can impact on an individual’s ability to “to perceive and react to disequilibria” (p25), which is a pre-requisite for an entrepreneur according to Kirzner. Dimov (2007) discusses the recognition of opportunities as being connected to ‘abilities such as higher-level learning’. Gibb (1993), in his investigation into enterprise culture and education examines a…
“…contingency theory of enterprising behaviour which argues that such behaviour can be induced and/or enhanced by the environment and thus can be acquired via experience and training as well as being a function of inherited personal traits” (p12).
He does not mention higher education per se here and clearly much has changed in the U.K. HE scene since he wrote this in 1993, but the argument remains that entrepreneurial behaviour can be brought about through some form of learning (training). The U.K. Government policy emphasises the important role that higher education and higher education institutions play in developing graduates who behave entrepreneurially across more than simply the ‘narrow focus on business start-up’, the implication being that higher education should be producing graduates who are capable of behaving in an entrepreneurial manner across a wide range of activities, not just in business. Higher education is associated with developing intelligence, abstract thinking, curiosity, problem-solving, discipline, motivation, self-confidence, etc. (Koellinger, 2008; Cooper et al., 1994) as well as providing academic knowledge and understanding and these skills may aid an entrepreneur in spotting, developing and implementing business ideas. Franco et al. (2010) also stress the fundamental role that HE institutions should play in providing students with the ability, motivation and knowledge to set up businesses.
Clouse (1990) found that students who had undertaken specific curricula designed to aid business start-up were more able to assess risk and make better decisions (although no definition of ‘better’ is given) after the courses than before. The implicit conclusion is that specific entrepreneurial education can aid entrepreneurial behaviour. However, Franco et al. (2010), in their study of students’ entrepreneurial intentions, were more cautious about the impact of entrepreneurship education and stated that it played, at best, a supporting role in encouraging students to behave entrepreneurially, despite acknowledging the contribution that HE as a whole can make. This study was an inter-regional comparison of students’
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entrepreneurial intentions in 3 universities from 3 ‘completely different cultural or economic realities’ (Western Germany, Eastern Germany and Central Portugal) and the sample comprised almost 1,000 students from across the academic spectrum and at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. The research method used in the study is unclear (the authors speak of both questionnaires and interviews) and hence it is difficult to explain exactly why, or how, the authors arrived at their conclusions about the low impact of entrepreneurship education.
The research carried out by Phan et al. (2002) investigated antecedents to entrepreneurship among university students in Singapore. These antecedent influences included background and experience. The sample used by the authors is large (over 13,000 students) but the authors themselves critique their study in that their sample is based on technology students and hence is not generalizable to non-technology students and I would take that critique further as the students all came from one university and thus all had the same educational experience. Despite these weaknesses the authors’ results suggest that educational efforts to encourage entrepreneurship are better aimed at developing the right attitudes and motivations towards being entrepreneurial (they should be practice-based) rather than focussing on entrepreneurial theory.
Interestingly, Stewart et al. (1998, cited in Phan et al., 2002) found that:
“While, on average, entrepreneurs were more educated than small business owners, corporate managers were the most highly educated group. This suggests that while content knowledge is important for individuals to take the entrepreneurial plunge, a surfeit of knowledge can lead to risk aversion behaviours that reduce the propensity to engage in entrepreneurial activity” (p154).
In other words, what students learn (content-related) and gain from HE could earmark them for entrepreneurial behaviour and could spur them into becoming entrepreneurs but there is a need to ensure that students do not, through education, become too aware of the potentially negative consequences of risk-taking, autonomous decision-making etc. and as a result take the ‘safer’ route of management instead of entrepreneurship.
As stated above, Vance et al. (2012) commented on the contention that HE can curb nonlinear thinking in students as part of their research to investigate the effect of higher education on thinking styles. They used business major freshmen and seniors at one U.S. university as the participants in their research. The participants completed a questionnaire
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that looked at linear/nonlinear thinking styles and that included a measure of entrepreneurial self-efficacy. The freshmen completed the questionnaire within a month of starting their university course and the seniors (a separate group to the freshmen) completed the questionnaire at the end of their four years of study. As a result of the research the authors concluded that….
“…attaining an undergraduate business degree may actually facilitate successful entrepreneurial thinking through building greater linear/nonlinear thinking style versatility and balance” (p136).
However, they acknowledged a number of limitations to their study, including the fact that the participant groups were not the same (a longitudinal study of the same group of students over time could have provided more reliable results). And although the authors were able to point to a stronger linear/nonlinear thinking style versatility and balance in the senior group, they do concede that the variable of student age (and thus cognitive maturation) could have influenced the results. There is no investigation into other non-academic factors that could also have accounted for this difference. So while their findings do point to ‘something’ having caused a change in approaches to thinking, there is no examination of what that ‘something’ could be – and hence their conclusion that business education ‘may’ cause a change.
The reasons why business degrees could facilitate entrepreneurial thinking are clear. If they do cause a change in thinking style as discussed by Vance et al. (2012), then alongside the business acumen and knowledge (an understanding of the functions of business) graduates of such degrees will have both the soft and hard skills necessary for entrepreneurship. Franco et al. (2010) did indeed find that business administration students had a higher level of entrepreneurial orientation than students from other disciplines. However, Tackey and Perryman (1999) discovered that there was a higher level of self-employment among graduates from creative arts and design degrees than among business students. Does this imply that, while business students are equipped with the necessary skills, thinking styles and content knowledge for entrepreneurship, something prevents them from turning that into entrepreneurial behaviour? This could be explained by the findings of Stewart et al. (1998), that too much content knowledge could lead to risk aversion and hence business students not acting entrepreneurially. Similarly, while Vance et al. (2012) did find that certain approaches to business education can increase linear/nonlinear thinking style balance they did not investigate whether this ability was then used by their sample to behave entrepreneurially.
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The emphasis of this research is the connection between student mobility and the development or enhancement of entrepreneurial attitudes. If higher education does have a role to play in developing students entrepreneurially, to what extent are particular aspects of international higher education, namely exposure to other cultures and environments, of even greater benefit?