Strategy performance assessment of Nigeria tertiary institution business education programme on entrepreneurship intervention

Aganbi Freeborn Omuvwie

Abstract

The study seeks to answer the question “how entrepreneurs are the business education graduates?” by providing a fair judgment on the effectiveness of the business education programme in Nigeria universities at fulfilling its utilitarian objective as an educational programme that prepares the individual to develop and handle private business ventures and function intelligently as entrepreneurs in a business economy. The main focus of this research is to determine the extent to which the Business Education programme has influenced the students’ entrepreneurship Intention in line with the programme key objective. The study involved a total of 1080 business education students in four universities in the Southern region of Nigeria. The experiment spanned a period of four years between 1996 and 1999 and the survey was administered to students in the regular business education programme, during the first semester of each successive year with two control groups. The study also considered gender differential on EI, EI differential between the regular and part-time students of the program; and compares students of other business and non-business programmes. It was hypothesized that Entrepreneurial Intentions (EI) of the students increase with successive learning objectives during the four-year programme. The findings show that there was no significant change in students’ EI during the period and this has both employment and social implications. No significant EI differential was noticeable between business education and non-business education disciplines. Gender was found to have no significant influence on EI. Business education students in the part-time programme reported higher EI than the students in the regular programme and EI is not significantly associated with student’s academic performance. The researcher recommended general overhaul of the entire business education programme in all tertiary institutions in Nigeria to accommodate core entrepreneurship training inclusively, to meet the individual and national goals.