The Effects of Entrepreneurship Education on Entrepreneurial Intention Among University Students in China

Introduction

With the rapid development of education in China, the number of college graduates is growing rapidly every year, the scarcity of college students had been broken. Fresh graduate has a great numerous post options. Entrepreneurship is regarded as one of the main ways for graduates, and it has been very common for foreign college students and at the same time the trend is still growing (Okenjom, 2016). Our enthusiasm for entrepreneurship began in the late 1970s when a researcher noticed that most job growth came from newer and smaller companies, not from the giant conglomerates of that era. As job growth is a prime objective of almost every city, state, and nation, it seemed obvious that entrepreneurship should be encouraged(Phillips, F,2018). The increase in entrepreneurship education programs have been driven by the recognition of it in creating more work opportunities, reducing the unemployment and shaping a regions development. The issue of entrepreneurship amongst university students, and the fostering of entrepreneurship activity, are increasingly becoming important. (Movabedi, Fathi & Brigal, 2011)

In 1999, the Ministry of Education introduced the “21st Century Action Plan for Invigorating Education”, it proposed to strengthen entrepreneurship education both for teachers and students to encourage them to establish high-tech enterprises. In 2002, the Ministry of Education issued series of policies and adopted enormous measures to encourage college students to become self-employed. Then the Ministry of Education set nine universities, including Tsinghua University, as entrepreneurship education pilots, encouraging these universities to explore methods adapted to entrepreneurship education and provide applicable references for other domestic universities in domestic to develop entrepreneurship education. An important assumption underlying these entrepreneurship programs is that “entrepreneurs can be make”, that it is possible to learn how to be an entrepreneur through different specific educational policies and programs (Erikson, 2003).

Subsequently, many universities started to set up entrepreneurship education program to promote the implementation of entrepreneurship education of college students. In 2010, the Ministry of Education released important documents that emphasized the importance of popularizing education, building up Students Entrepreneurship Base and providing the further policy supports to college students, all these had a vital catalytic role in promoting college students to entrepreneurship. At one time, entrepreneurship has become a hot research area. Due to the entrepreneurial intention can better predict the entrepreneurial behavior (Ajzen, 1991; Zhang et al., 2013), academic research is mainly focused on the entrepreneurial intention and its influence factors (Bae et al., 2014; Warren, 2011). Some scholars believed that with the increasing number of college graduates more competitive and high expectations will aggravate serious employment situation, so implement the entrepreneurship education timely is good for improving entrepreneurial intentions of college students (Abdullah et al., 2014). However, entrepreneurship is full of uncertainties, even college students have an entrepreneurial intention, when faced with difficulties such as management, capital, risk and etc, most college students discouraged and it was reported that the success rate of college students entrepreneurship is only 1%.