ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION IN ROMANIAN UNIVERSITIES: DEVELOPING STUDENT ENTREPRENEURIAL BEHAVIOUR

Entrepreneurship education within higher education institutions has emerged over the last decades as a major trend, manifested by the explosion of the number of entrepreneurship courses offered by universities, especially by business and economics schools. A multitude of studies investigated the effectiveness of university entrepreneurship education by assessing its impact on entrepreneurial intentions and entrepreneurial action, and by identifying and measuring of the main factors that contribute to their formation and expression. This paper contributes to the literature on university entrepreneurship education and student entrepreneurship by providing findings from a recent study conducted on a sample of 340 students (potential and actual entrepreneurs) of the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, the largest university of economic studies in Romania. The need for this study was generated by the fact that the Romanian entrepreneurial landscape shows particular characteristics: the rate of entrepreneurial intentions (to start a new business within three years) is the highest in the Central and Eastern Europe, the share of younger entrepreneurs (18-24 y.o.) involved in early stage of entrepreneurial activity is among the highest in Europe, the entrepreneurs are predominantly opportunity-motivated (than necessity motivated) but have low ambitions regarding innovation. The paper is structured as follows. The first section provides the conceptual framework of the research that places emphasis on entrepreneurship education in universities, student entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial intensions formation and the main factors that contribute to it, and the motives and barriers that stimulate or impede upon the transformation of entrepreneurial intentions into action. The second section of the paper presents the results of a qualitative study on student entrepreneurial behaviour which was investigated in terms of: entrepreneurial intention, type of activity, motives and barriers for entrepreneurship, family business background, entrepreneurship education and training. The final section discusses the implications of the study for different stakeholders with attributions in developing educational programmes and curricula, policies, regulations and other operational measures aimed at stimulating entrepreneurship.