Title: An impact evaluation of entrepreneurship education on self-employment option among Nigerian university undergraduates

Authors: Olufemi B. Obembe; Rosemary O. Soetan; Ifeolu O. Olagbaju; Catherine O. Oyetunji-Alemede; Folashade O. Akinyemi

Addresses: Department of Economics, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria ' Department of Economics, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria ' Department of Economics, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria ' Department of Psychology, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria ' Institute For Entrepreneurship and Development Studies, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria

Abstract: There has been overwhelming evidence in support of the positive impact of entrepreneurship education in fostering entrepreneurial mindsets and invariably intentions among students by many researchers. However, a series of systematic reviews conducted on the study found that most of the studies adopted a less rigorous method of analysis thereby over-estimating the impact of entrepreneurship education. Our study therefore adopted a propensity score matching (PSM) approach, one of the proven techniques for policy evaluation, to further evaluate the impact of the progamme among university students from three universities in Nigeria. Students that were yet to take the entrepreneurship education course were selected as controls for those who had taken the course using propensity score. The outcome variable was measured using a binary choice variable and a continuous variable generated from a scale that measures the likelihood of students taking to self-employment. The MatchIt package in R was utilised for the evaluation and our results show that entrepreneurship education had a positive but not significant impact on self-employment choice among the students. Our results indicate that the much optimism placed on entrepreneurship education in solving unemployment problems in Nigeria should be viewed with caution.

Keywords: entrepreneurship education; impact evaluation; propensity score matching; youth unemployment; self-employment; Nigeria.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSEI.2021.119268

International Journal of Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 2021 Vol.6 No.1, pp.1 - 23

Received: 12 Dec 2020
Accepted: 16 Feb 2021
Published online: 30 Nov 2021 *

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