Small Bus Econ (2020) 55:257–282
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-019-00143-y
The impact of entrepreneurship education on university
students’ entrepreneurial skills: a family embeddedness
perspective
Davide Hahn & Tommaso Minola & Giulio Bosio &
Lucio Cassia
Accepted: 5 February 2019 / Published online: 12 March 2019
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract To provide individuals with entrepreneurial
skills and prepare them to engage in entrepreneurial activ-
ities, universities offer entrepreneurship education (EE)
courses. However, the growing number of studies on EE
impact offers mixed and apparently contradictory results.
The present study contributes to this literature by indicat-
ing the type of EE (elective vs. compulsory) and the
characteristics of students’ exposure to an enterprising
family as two complementary boundary conditions that
contribute to explain the outcomes of EE. To do so, the
D. Hahn : T. Minola (*) : L. Cassia
Department of Management, Information and Production
Engineering, University of Bergamo, Via Pasubio 7b,
24044 Dalmine, BG, Italy
e-mail: tommaso.minola@unibg.it
D. Hahn
e-mail: davide.hahn@unibg.it
L. Cassia
e-mail: lucio.cassia@unibg.it
D. Hahn : T. Minola : G. Bosio : L. Cassia
Center for Young and Family Enterprise, University of Bergamo,
Via Salvecchio 19, 24127 Bergamo, BG, Italy
G. Bosio
e-mail: giulio.bosio@unibg.it
G. Bosio
Department of Management, Economics and Quantitative
Methods, University of Bergamo, Via dei Caniana 2,
24127 Bergamo, BG, Italy
paper takes advantage of quasi-experimental research on a
sample of 427 university students who participated to two
consecutive waves of the Global University Entrepreneur-
ial Spirit Students’ Survey (GUESSS). The study finds that
both types of EE contribute to students’ entrepreneurial
skills; however, the impact of EE in compulsory courses is
contingent on students’ perceptions of parents’ perfor-
mance as entrepreneurs.
Keywords University entrepreneurship . Student
entrepreneurship . Entrepreneurship education . Family
embeddedness . Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit
Students’ Survey (GUESSS)
JEL classifications I23 . J24 . L26
1 Introduction
Individuals endowed with entrepreneurial skills, who
are able to identify and act upon new business opportu-
nities (Politis 2005), drive economic growth and societal
well-being by spurring the exploitation and commercial-
ization of knowledge (Audretsch and Belitski 2013). By
providing individuals with these skills, universities can
make a relevant contribution to society (Audretsch
2014; Laukkanen 2000). With the purposes of offering
students opportunities to engage in entrepreneurial
learning (Hahn et al. 2017), universities have been pro-
viding entrepreneurship education (EE) extensively
(Kuratko 2005; Mustar 2009; Rauch and Hulsink
2015). This has attracted the interest of a vibrant
258
research stream aimed at evaluating EE’s impact on
students (Lyons and Zhang 2018; Naia et al. 2014;
Rideout and Gray 2013).
However, judicious evaluations on the extent to which
EE can actually produce the valuable outcomes universi-
ties aim for have produced contrasting results that report
positive (Karlsson and Moberg 2013; Rauch and Hulsink
2015; Sànchez 2011), non-significant (Oosterbeek et al.
2010), and even negative effects (Chang and Rieple 2013).
This has been attributed both to empirical and conceptual
inaccuracies (Nabi et al. 2017). Specifically, relatively little
is known on the boundary conditions under which entre-
preneurship education is more effective (Bae et al. 2014;
Martin et al. 2013). A nuanced appraisal of the contextual
dimensions under which EE and learning processes occur
is deemed as necessary to advance the scholarly knowl-
edge effectively in this field (Nabi et al. 2017). In partic-
ular, with EE becoming more and more diffused through-
out campuses, it tends to reach individuals who differ in
terms of demographics, prior entrepreneurial exposure,
and commitment. The heterogeneous profiles of partici-
pants to entrepreneurship courses, whose outcomes have
been assessed in extant EE impact studies, represent a
potential reason for heterogeneous results, leading to con-
trasting findings and limited theoretical advancement
(Martin et al. 2013; Naia et al. 2014). In fact, the audience
of EE is deemed to assume a particular importance in
determining the outcomes of EE observed by scholars
(Fayolle and Gailly 2015; Lyons and Zhang 2018; von
Graevenitz et al. 2010) because the benefits of EE depend
to large extent on the learner (Béchard and Grégoire 2005).
For example, it has been suggested that entrepreneurial
skills are particularly difficult to teach unless the student
actively takes part to the learning process (Honig 2004;
Mueller and Anderson 2014). Despite this intuition, extant
literature is still lacking evidence that explores the hetero-
geneity of university students as a contingency that influ-
ences learning and obtained skills from EE (Fayolle 2013;
Nabi et al. 2017; Naia et al. 2014).
To address such limitation, this paper offers a deep
examination of students’ profile in evaluating the out-
comes of EE. In particular, it follows recent recommen-
dations (e.g., Nabi et al. 2017; Naia et al. 2014; Martin
et al. 2013) and explores two boundary conditions that, if
taken together, describe the profile of participants to EE
and their predisposition to learn from educational inter-
ventions. First, the characteristics of students attending
EE depend on the type of course attended (Karimi et al.
2016; Nabi et al. 2017). More specifically, students
D. Hahn et al.
attending elective courses explicitly self-select into EE
(von Graevenitz et al. 2010) and generally have a stron-
ger specific interest for entrepreneurship as a career op-
tion (Rauch and Hulsink 2015). In contrast, the partici-
pation to compulsory courses is mandatory for students
to complete the studies they have chosen (Karimi et al.
2016) that require them to learn what entrepreneurship is
about (Rauch and Hulsink 2015). Albeit these motiva-
tional aspects can specifically affect the results produced
by EE (Karimi et al. 2016; Martin et al. 2013; Rauch and
Hulsink 2015), research on this is scant.
Second, the paper considers a social dimension of EE
audience by taking into account students’ embeddedness
in a family (Aldrich and Cliff 2003; Sieger and Minola
2017) and particularly in an enterprising one (Jaskiewicz
et al. 2015; Minola et al. 2016a) for both theoretical and
practical reasons. From a theoretical perspective, as ac-
knowledged by a flourishing stream of research (Criaco
et al. 2017; Laspita et al. 2012), an enterprising family
represents a social context that offers a unique learning
environment (Hamilton 2011), which complements uni-
versity EE (Bae et al. 2014). From a practical standpoint,
family-based businesses are ubiquitous, especially in the
European context, and a large fraction of university stu-
dents have been exposed to entrepreneurship in their
families before receiving EE (Salvato et al. 2015). De-
spite some research efforts in such direction (e.g., Fayolle
and Gailly 2015; Peterman and Kennedy 2003; von
Graevenitz et al. 2010), very little is known about the
channels through which an exposure to an enterprising
family works, also because such exposure is usually
proxied by the measure Bhaving entrepreneurs as
parents.^ To overcome this limitation, this paper disen-
tangles exposure to an enterprising family into two di-
mensions that the literature indicates as particularly rele-
vant (Criaco et al. 2017; Hamilton 2011; Mungai and
Velamuri 2011): perceived parents’ performance in en-
trepreneurship (PPE) and students’ actual working expe-
rience for their family enterprise.
In sum, this study explores the moderated model
where the relationship between EE in different courses
(elective vs. compulsory) and entrepreneurial skills is
contingent on students’ exposure to an enterprising fam-
ily (PPE and work experience). To test such framework,
the study draws on a longitudinal sample of 427 univer-
sity students from different study fields and education
levels in eight European countries. The sample is obtain-
ed by selecting students who participated to two consec-
utive waves (2013 and 2016) of the Global University
The impact of entrepreneurship education on university students’’ entrepreneurial skills: a family...
Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey (GUESSS) and
who did not attend EE courses before 2013. This empir-
ical setting provides a valuable opportunity to rely on a
quasi-experimental design in order to explore the bound-
ary conditions of EE. Quasi-experimental designs allow
researchers to assess the effect of training interventions
by examining the differences pre- and post-intervention
in students not randomly assigned to entrepreneurship
education and to a control group (Rauch and Hulsink
2015). This approach has been recently recommended to
test the impact of EE more rigorously (Rideout and Gray
2013) particularly in exploring the effect on skills and
abilities (Karlsson and Moberg 2013).
The results reveal that, when separating elective and
compulsory EE, only the former has a general positive
effect on students’ entrepreneurial skills. On the other
hand, our result shows that the extent to which students
benefit from taking EE in compulsory courses is contin-
gent to their prior exposure to an enterprising family; in
particular, we observe that only at higher level of PPE
students in compulsory courses benefit from EE to a
significant extent.
The findings contribute to extant literature on how
universities can support the proliferation of entrepreneurial
individuals in an entrepreneurial society (Audretsch 2014;
Audretsch and Belitski 2013) by conceptualizing and ex-
ploring the role of individuals with their university and
social contexts as critical boundary conditions. The paper
also adds to literature on EE and university entrepreneur-
ship by offering a more nuanced view of the contingencies
under which university efforts to stimulate entrepreneurial
learning among students are more likely to succeed. More-
over, it provides further insights about the role played by
the family in the transmission of entrepreneurship by
conceptualizing and empirically disentangling different
channels for the influence of an enterprising family.
2 Literature review
2.1 The controversial impact of entrepreneurship
education on university students’ entrepreneurial skills
Universities can make a key contribution to societal devel-
opment by creating a context that equips individuals with
entrepreneurial skills (Audretsch 2014; Audretsch and
Lehmann 2005; Shah and Pahnke 2014), which allow
them to perform the variety of tasks required to identify
and act upon new business opportunities (Karlsson and
259
Moberg 2013; McGee et al. 2009). For this purpose, in the
last decade, EE has been increasingly incorporated in
higher education curricula at different levels (bachelor,
master, and doctoral) and in different study fields (not
only business and economics, but also social and natural
sciences and engineering; Mustar 2009; Shinnar et al.
2009; Souitaris et al. 2007). The assumption underlying
such growing diffusion of entrepreneurship courses in
universities is that students attending EE will learn entre-
preneurial skills (Hahn et al. 2017; Karlsson and Moberg
2013) of which they can take advantage during their future
careers, as employees, self-employed workers, or entrepre-
neurs (Laukkanen 2000; Leitch et al. 2012).
However, scholarly research that attempted to quan-
tify the outcomes of EE has cast some doubts on this
assumption, by questioning what might be the actual
impact of EE on university students’ entrepreneurial
skills (Hahn et al. 2017; Nabi et al. 2017). Indeed, EE
impact studies show contrasting results: in some cases,
they show a positive effect of EE on entrepreneurial
skills (Karlsson and Moberg 2013; Sànchez 2011), but
some other research reveals mixed (Volery et al. 2013),
non-significant (Oosterbeek et al. 2010), and even neg-
ative effects (Chang and Rieple 2013). While most stud-
ies suggest a positive correlation between EE and entre-
preneurial skills, those studies that comply with rigorous
methodological standards to identify the effect of EE
(e.g., using control groups or longitudinal research
designs; Rideout and Gray 2013) offer more controver-
sial results (Bae et al. 2014; Martin et al. 2013; Nabi et al.
2017). Among these studies, Souitaris et al. (2007) found
no significant effect of EE on students’ perceived ability
to become entrepreneurs; the authors suggest that the
non-significant effect found in their study occurs due to
the sample they have adopted, composed of elite univer-
sity students who had high self-confidence in entrepre-
neurship even before attending the course. Oosterbeek
et al. (2010) and Volery et al. (2013) advanced another
possible explanation for the non-significant effect of EE
on self-assessed entrepreneurial skills: after the course,
students have obtained a more realistic perspective on
what it takes to perform entrepreneurial tasks, thus revis-
ing their self-confidence in entrepreneurial skills. In a
qualitative study, Chang and Rieple (2013) support this
argument. They found that, during an entrepreneurship
course, students’ self-assessed skills even declined be-
cause students were exposed to challenges that made
them realize the inadequacy of their skills to face the
hurdles encountered during the entrepreneurial process.
260
On a similar note, those studies using robust research
designs that found a positive effect of entrepreneurship
courses—in the direction also recommended by Rideout
and Gray (2013)—contain some caveats and suggest
that some boundary conditions might bias their results
in favor of educational interventions (Lyons and Zhang
2018; Rauch and Hulsink 2015). For example, Karlsson
and Moberg (2013), whose study revealed a positive
effect of EE on self-assessed entrepreneurial skills, also
found that such increase was remarkably lower for
students who had already mastered entrepreneurial skills
before starting the course. Fayolle and Gailly (2015)
found that after a six-month entrepreneurship course,
students increased their confidence in performing entre-
preneurial tasks, but such increase was remarkably low-
er for students with entrepreneurs in their families.
Rauch and Hulsink (2015), who adopted a quasi-
experimental research design to assess the effect of an
entrepreneurship course, recognized that the positive
effect on perceived entrepreneurial skills they found
could be upward biased by the elective nature of the
course. Accordingly, they raised some concerns about
the generalizability of their findings.
In sum, the conflicting results of this research have
induced scholars to explore the reasons for such hetero-
geneity in EE impact (Fayolle and Gailly 2015; Hahn
et al. 2017; Karimi et al. 2016). In other words, to move
the scholarly discussion ahead, rather than merely asking
whether EE is effective or not, recent calls have indicated
that the circumstances in which EE takes place matter,
and have advocated exploratory studies on the boundary
conditions under which EE leads to the desired outcomes
(Fayolle 2013; Martin et al. 2013; Nabi et al. 2017). In
particular, scholars have argued that the contradictory
outcomes revealed by EE impact studies can be ex-
plained if the audience of entrepreneurship is better taken
into account (Martin et al. 2013; Naia et al. 2014; Toutain
et al. 2017).
Literature on students’ entrepreneurial learning pro-
cess and its outcomes (Dodd and Hynes 2012; Mueller
and Anderson 2014; Neck and Greene 2011) provides
valuable suggestions in this respect (Leitch et al. 2012;
Walter and Dohse 2012; Wilson et al. 2007). It has been
argued that, for students to actually benefit from partic-
ipation to EE, they need to be predisposed to and gen-
uinely interested in entrepreneurship before attending
the course (Karimi et al. 2016; Mueller and Anderson
2014). While to learn hard facts about business the
learner could be a passive recipient of information
D. Hahn et al.
transmitted by instructors in the classroom, in order to
acquire entrepreneurial skills, students need to take a
proactive role in their learning process (Haase and
Lautenschläger 2011; Honig 2004; Neck and Greene
2011). Beyond motivation, it has been recently shown
that individuals would react differently to EE based on
their pre-existing experiences (von Graevenitz et al.
2010), which endow them with abilities, human and
social capital, and a legitimacy perception of entrepre-
neurship (Peterman and Kennedy 2003). These help
students to learn and elaborate on EE effectively in order
to gain entrepreneurial skills that prove effective in
performing entrepreneurial tasks (Hahn et al. 2017). In
this respect, the type of entrepreneurship course (Nabi
et al. 2017; Rauch and Hulsink 2015) and the family
embeddedness of the participants (Fayolle and Gailly
2015) have been indicated as valuable dimensions in
exploring the audience as a boundary condition of EE.
2.2 The type of entrepreneurship education course
as boundary condition
EE can be offered to university students in different
types of courses. In some curricula, attending EE is
required to obtain the degree (i.e., compulsory courses),
while in others, attending an entrepreneurship course
represents one of the various options available to stu-
dents in order to gain course credits necessary for grad-
uation (i.e., elective courses). To date, in the attempt to
assess the impact of EE on university students, most
papers have analyzed the outcomes of single programs
or have condensed different types of courses together. In
doing so, they could not explore the type of course
(elective rather than compulsory) as a boundary condi-
tion that can influence the results students obtain from
EE. A notable exception is offered by a study of Karimi
et al. (2016). However, these authors did not employ
control groups of students who did not take EE. Without
such methodological refinement, the researchers could
not completely isolate the effect associated with EE in
the two types of courses. Recognizing this, instead, is
important because EE in compulsory and elective
courses is addressed to different profiles of participants,
and such differences can be crucial in explaining the
contrasting outcomes observed in different impact stud-
ies (Karimi et al. 2016; Rauch and Hulsink 2015; Nabi
et al. 2017).
First, while participants to elective EE show a spe-
cific preference towards learning entrepreneurship by
The impact of entrepreneurship education on university students’’ entrepreneurial skills: a family...
self-selecting directly in EE courses (Karimi et al. 2016),
in compulsory courses, classes are made up of a mix of
students with varying degrees of interest in entrepre-
neurship. These students have self-selected into
studies—typically business studies—in which entrepre-
neurship courses complement the variety of subjects
taught (von Graevenitz et al. 2010). Some authors
(Rauch and Hulsink 2015) even argue that participation
to EE in elective courses is generally conceived for
students who have interest in entrepreneurship as a
possible career and who aim to acquire the skills to
become entrepreneurs, while EE in compulsory courses
usually Bdoes not try to create entrepreneurs per se, but
rather to teach participants what entrepreneurship is
about^ (Rauch and Hulsink 2015: 200). As a result,
students in elective EE courses are more likely to as-
sume a more active posture in learning activities than
students forced to take a course, which makes it easier to
observe positive outcomes of EE (Lyons and Zhang
2018; Rauch and Hulsink 2015).
Second, there are reasons to believe that non-
significant (Souitaris et al. 2007)—or even negative
(Chang and Rieple 2013)—influences of EE on stu-
dents’ confidence in their entrepreneurial skills can be
explained by the elective nature of EE. In such context,
students might select the course confident in their entre-
preneurial aptitudes and motivated to reinforce them, for
example, because they had already received EE in
which they learnt about entrepreneurship. However,
during an entrepreneurship course, they can be exposed
to experiences and knowledge that challenge their be-
liefs about entrepreneurship, leading to decline in their
confidence in their skills (Chang and Rieple 2013).
Also, the course might not be sufficient to satisfy their
expectations (Hytti et al. 2010).
In sum, it appears that the type of course represents a
boundary condition that is worth exploring in order to
obtain a more nuanced understanding of the impact of
EE (Nabi et al. 2017). Accordingly, this paper tests the
effect produced by EE in compulsory and elective
courses on university students’ perceived entrepreneur-
ial skills.
2.3 Students’ family embeddedness as boundary
condition
Besides and together with the type of course, scholars
assessing the impact of EE have been advised to con-
sider the specific entrepreneurial background of the
261
audience taking entrepreneurship courses (Hahn et al.
2017; Lyons and Zhang 2018; Martin et al. 2013). This
paper considers family embeddedness and, more specif-
ically, exposure to an enterprising family as a boundary
condition that contributes to explaining the contradicto-
ry findings of EE impact studies. BExposure to an en-
terprising family^ refers to the existence of an entrepre-
neurial activity, in which the student’s family exerts
significant influence in decision-making (Jaskiewicz
et al. 2015; Minola et al. 2016a) and is therefore to some
extent responsible for the development of entrepreneur-
ial dynamics (Rogoff and Heck 2003). Family-
controlled firms are widely diffused in any world econ-
omy (Memili et al. 2015) and represent a key context
affecting students’ social and cognitive development. In
their family, university students can be exposed to en-
trepreneurship before being enrolled in EE (Peterman
and Kennedy 2003). At the same time, such exposure
can be source of stress and negative perceptions about
entrepreneurship (Criaco et al. 2017; Sieger and Minola
2017). Unfortunately, most literature on student entre-
preneurship and EE treat exposure to entrepreneurship
in the family as a dichotomic dimension (have vs. not
have), hence overlooking its nuanced nature.
Prior exposure to an enterprising family represents an
important contingency that influences the impact of EE
(Fayolle and Gailly 2015; Peterman and Kennedy
2003), because in entrepreneurship courses, students
evaluate the learning experiences in the classroom also
on the basis of their previous knowledge and beliefs
about entrepreneurship (Chang and Rieple 2013; von
Graevenitz et al. 2010). Both these can be influenced by
an enterprising family, which is inherently an effective
entrepreneurial learning environment (Hamilton 2011).
Besides, exposure to an enterprising family might affect
a student’s desire for an entrepreneurial career, in gen-
eral and in the family firm (Block et al. 2013; Laspita
et al. 2012). Also, through exposure to close individual
involvement in entrepreneurship, students are more like-
ly to recognize and conform to entrepreneurial role
models (Chlosta et al. 2012) and to perceive entrepre-
neurship as a more legitimate career. Such desirability
and legitimacy perceptions could determine students’
roles as active rather than passive learners and hence
impact the effectiveness of EE in different types of
contexts (i.e., compulsory rather than elective).
Besides considering exposure to an enterprising fam-
ily as such, this paper builds on literature on the inter-
generational transmission of entrepreneurship, which
262
invites scholars to account for the specific nature of such
exposure (Criaco et al. 2017; Mungai and Velamuri
2011). Also in the context of EE, Peterman and
Kennedy (2003) and von Graevenitz et al. (2010) dis-
tinguish between positive and negative exposure to en-
trepreneurship in investigating its effect on the results
obtained by high school students from an elective en-
trepreneurship course. Therefore, to gain a more nu-
anced understanding of the influence of exposure to an
enterprising family, it is important to disentangle the
specific mechanisms through which such exposure
works.
First, the paper considers the PPE. Considering this
aspect is important because the extent to which students
perceive their parents’ entrepreneurial activity as suc-
cessful has been shown to influence their inclination
towards entrepreneurship (Criaco et al. 2017; Mungai
and Velamuri 2011). Indeed, successful self-employed
parents can act as role models transferring values about
entrepreneurship to their children (Chlosta et al. 2012;
Hoffmann et al. 2015) and can use their influence as
close family members to stimulate students’ interest
towards entrepreneurship (Criaco et al. 2017). Having
self-employed parents as role models, students might
become attracted to entrepreneurship, aim to learn more
about it, and end up doing so. Therefore, PPE could play
an important role in determining whether the exposure
to self-employed parents represents an obstacle or pre-
disposes students towards actively participating and
learning from EE.
Second, the paper considers the experience obtain-
ed by students in their parents’ entrepreneurial activ-
ity. By working in their parents’ firm, students have
the opportunity to accumulate hands-on business ex-
periences (Criaco et al. 2017), which can influence
the extent to which they learn from EE (Fayolle and
Gailly 2015). Such first-hand entrepreneurial experi-
ence can assist them in better absorbing, processing,
Fig. 1 Graphical representation of the research framework
D. Hahn et al.
and taking advantage of the information provided in
the classroom to further develop their entrepreneurial
skills (Hahn et al. 2017; Lyons and Zhang 2018).
Conversely, students with experience in their parents’
entrepreneurial activity might benefit less from EE
because, compared to other students who have never
been exposed to entrepreneurship, they might already
be aware of entrepreneurship and have less to learn
(Karlsson and Moberg 2013; Peterman and Kennedy
2003; von Graevenitz et al. 2010). In light of these
contrasting arguments, we include in our framework
students’ experience in parents’ family business as a
relevant dimension of their exposure to an enterpris-
ing family.
The research framework that guides the study is
represented in Fig. 1. The effect of EE on university
students’ entrepreneurial skills in elective and compul-
sory courses is tested. How this effect is moderated by
students’ exposure to an enterprising family, which is
disentangled into PPE and work experience in the par-
ents’ family business, is also tested.
3 Data
3.1 Research design
This study relies on a quasi-experimental research
design, whose adoption has been encouraged to
rigorously identify the actual impact of educational
interventions on students who have been exposed to
EE (Rauch and Hulsink 2015; Rideout and Gray
2013; Volery et al. 2013). A quasi-experimental
design is particularly appropriate to test the effect
produced by EE interventions (Karlsson and Moberg
2013), when students cannot be randomly assign to
the educational intervention (EE), as in true experi-
ments (Rauch and Hulsink 2015). In a quasi-
The impact of entrepreneurship education on university students’’ entrepreneurial skills: a family...
experimental design, students are assigned to a
group that is not exposed to any educational inter-
vention (i.e., the comparison or control group) and
to groups that are exposed to different educational
interventions. In this study, the intervention consists
in elective and compulsory EE. Accordingly, stu-
dents are clustered into three different groups: (i) a
control group of students who have not been ex-
posed to EE, neither before 2013 nor between
2013 and 2016; (ii) students who have not been
exposed to EE before 2013 but received EE in
compulsory courses between 2013 and 2016; and
(iii) students who have not been exposed to EE
before 2013 but who received EE in elective courses
between 2013 and 2016. The effect of educational
interventions is identified by observing the changes
of the outcome variables of interest (i.e., entrepre-
neurial skills) after the exposure to EE and in ab-
sence of EE. Moreover, as described in the section
below, an appropriate set of control variables is
introduced to account for initial differences between
groups, thereby mitigating the bias introduced by
non-random selection of individuals into different
groups (Rauch and Hulsink 2015).
3.2 Sample
The empirical analysis of this paper is based on a
sample of university students who participated to two
consecutive waves of the Global University Entre-
preneurial Spirit Students’ Survey (GUESSS)1: in
2013 and in 2016. The Swiss Research Institute of
Small Business and Entrepreneurship at the Univer-
sity of St. Gallen (KMU-HSG) in Switzerland coor-
dinates the GUESSS project at a global level. At the
country level, a representative of the project has the
task of distributing the survey and collecting the data
from the universities of that country. Students who
answered the survey were reached through a non-
random process in which universities were autono-
mous in defining the breadth of classes and schools
involved in the survey. Students were invited to an-
swer the questionnaire through different channels,
such as in social networks, via email, or in the
1
A full description of the GUESSS project is available at the website
www.guesssurvey.org. Several works based on the GUESSS project
have already been published in entrepreneurship journals: see, for
example, Bergmann et al. (2016); Minola, Donina, and Meoli (2016);
and Sieger and Minola (2017).
263
classroom. The students reached by the survey be-
long to different fields of study (i.e., business and
economics, natural and social sciences) and different
education levels (e.g., undergraduate, graduate).
After the data collection carried out in 2016, the
GUESSS team built a longitudinal dataset by matching
the responses provided by students who participated to
the two consecutive surveys in order to build a longi-
tudinal database. The complete longitudinal GUESSS
2013–2016 dataset records the answers from 1383
students from 21 countries. In order to reduce the cul-
tural heterogeneity in the sample, this paper focuses its
analysis only on European countries. After excluding
those countries whose number of complete responses
was below 5, the sample contains students from the
following countries: Austria, Germany, Switzerland,
Italy, Spain, Estonia, Hungary, and Poland. Table 1
reports the breakdown of students in the final sample
by country.
The longitudinal nature of the dataset provides a
valuable opportunity to identify the effects caused by
the participation to entrepreneurship courses. To further
take advantage of this aspect, the analysis included only
questionnaires of students who in the 2013 survey re-
ported not having attended EE before. The sample also
excluded the few students who attended EE in both
elective and compulsory EE. By doing so, it was possi-
ble to compare the change in entrepreneurial skills from
2013 to 2016 between students who participated to
(compulsory or elective) EE for the first time in the
period from 2013 and 2016 and students who had never
received EE. Finally, the sample excluded respondents
for which it was not possible to build the variables of
interest. The final sample size consists of 427 student
entrepreneurs.
Table 1 Breakdown of
the final sample by Country No. of students
country
Austria 35
Estonia 8
Germany 151
Hungary 51
Italy 48
Poland 24
Spain 71
Switzerland 39
Total 427
264
3.3 Measures
3.3.1 Dependent variables
The dependent variable is entrepreneurial skills16. To
identify and act upon new business opportunities, entre-
preneurs need the skill to perform a variety of tasks:
identifying the need for new products or services, de-
signing and commercializing these products or services
as innovation, building networks to access external ex-
pertise and resources, and persuading others to believe
in their business idea (Karlsson and Moberg 2013;
McGee et al. 2009). Accordingly, to measure students’
entrepreneurial skills in 2016, they were asked to eval-
uate their competence in performing the following tasks
on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = very low competence, 7 =
very high competence) inspired by extant self-efficacy
and creativity scales (Chen et al. 1998; Kickul et al.
2009; Zhou and George 2001): (1) BIdentifying new
business opportunities^; (2) BCreating new products
and services^; (3) BManaging innovation within a firm^;
(4) BBeing a leader and communicator^; (5) BBuilding
up a professional network^; (6) BCommercializing a
new idea or development^; and (7) BSuccessfully man-
aging a business.^ The items of this scale loaded on a
single factor, while the reliability of the scale was tested
by computing Cronbach’s alpha, which resulted in 0.91,
above the recommended value of 0.7 (Nunnally 1978).
The scores of the seven items were thus averaged to
compute the dependent variable, entrepreneurial
skills16.
3.3.2 Independent variables
To test the relationship between EE and entrepreneur-
ial skills, in a first step, the independent variable EE
is built, a dummy variable that takes the value of 1 if
the student attended EE in the period between 2013
and 2016, as reported in the 2016 GUESSS survey (0
otherwise). In a second step, the EE variable is
unpacked to distinguish between elective EE and
compulsory EE. Both are measured through binary
variables that take the value of 1 if the students
attended EE in a compulsory or elective course, re-
spectively, in the period between the two consecutive
waves of the survey (0 otherwise). These two vari-
ables were also built by using information collected
in the 2016 wave of the GUESSS survey.
D. Hahn et al.
3.3.3 Moderation variables
In the moderated model, the relationship between EE
and entrepreneurial skills is conditional on students’
exposure to an enterprising family. In a first step, this
is described through the raw measure self-employed
parents, a binary variable coded as 1 if at least one of
student’s parents was self-employed, according to stu-
dents’ responses to the 2013 survey.
In a second step, instead of considering the crude
measure of self-employed parents, students’ expo-
sure to an enterprising family is unpacked; two
moderating variables are built that together capture
the mechanisms through which exposure to an en-
terprising family produces its influence. The first of
these two variables is PPE, measured through the
scale adopted in Criaco et al. (2017), whose five
items together constitute a multidimensional and
subjective measure of performance commonly
employed in family business research (Eddleston
et al. 2008). The creation of this variable relies on
the responses of students with self-employed parents
to the 2013 survey, who assessed the performance of
their parents’ entrepreneurial activity on a 7-point
Likert scale (1 = worse; 7 = better) relative to their
competitors in terms of five dimensions (i.e., sales
growth, market share growth, profit growth, job
creation, and innovativeness). The items of this
scale load on a single factor and are reliable (α =
0.82). For the regression equations, PPE is standard-
ized, a procedure commonly employed to avoid
multicollinearity issues when continuous variables
are multiplied to create interaction terms (Aiken
and West 1991). For students without self-
employed parents, PPE is multiplied by 0, having
no influence on the dependent variables of the re-
gression equation. Second, the variable experience
in the parents’ entrepreneurial activity is built, by
measuring by the number of months students
worked in their parents’ entrepreneurial activity (0
for students without self-employed parents), as re-
ported in the 2013 survey. As for PPE, experience is
standardized before being interacted with the inde-
pendent variables.
3.3.4 Control variables
First, to observe the change of students’ entrepre-
neurial skills due to the EE, the lagged value of
The impact of entrepreneurship education on university students’’ entrepreneurial skills: a family...
entrepreneurial skills (entrepreneurial skills13), ob-
tained from students’ assessment in the 2013 wave
of the survey,2 is included as control variable to the
regression equations. To build this variable, the
same seven items used in the 2016 wave of the
survey are used, obtaining a Cronbach’s alpha of
0.90.
Second, taking advantage of students’ responses to
the 2013 GUESSS survey, a range of individual-level
variables are controlled as they might be correlated
with students’ interest and predisposition towards en-
trepreneurship and affect the results they obtain from
taking (or not taking) entrepreneurship courses. Stu-
dents’ entrepreneurial intentions, measured through
the items developed by Liñán and Chen (2009), are
controlled for. Since items load on a single factor and
the data confirm the reliability of the scale (Cronbach’s
alpha = 0.97), entrepreneurial intention was computed
as the average of the six items of the scale, which
students evaluated in the 2013 wave of the survey on
a 7-point Likert scale. Students’ nascent entrepreneur
status in 2013 is also controlled for. Following previ-
ous research (Bergmann et al. 2016; Karlsson and
Moberg 2013; McGee et al. 2009; Souitaris et al.
2007), nascent entrepreneurs are defined as those stu-
dents who were actually trying to start their entrepre-
neurial activity and had actually performed some con-
crete gestation activities to do so (Bird et al. 2012;
Carter et al. 1996). The control variable nascent entre-
preneurial activity was thus coded as a binary variable.
It takes the value of 1 for students who in the 2013
wave of the survey stated that they were Btrying to start
your own business/to become self-employed^ and had
also completed at least one of the following gestation
activities: written a business plan; started product/
service development; started marketing or promotion
efforts; purchased material, equipment, or machinery
for the business; attempted to obtain external funding;
applied for a patent, copyright, or trademark; regis-
tered the business; sold product or service. To control
for students’ interest towards entrepreneurship before
2
The inclusion of the lagged values of the dependent variables raises
concerns related to the potential autocorrelation in the error terms. The
Cumby and Huizinga (1992) statistic is applied to test for autocorrela-
tion of order 1 in the residuals under the null hypothesis of no auto-
correlation. The statistic rejects the null hypothesis of entrepreneurial
skills being serially uncorrelated (χ2 = 169.062, p < 0.001) and shows
that serial correlation between the dependent variable and its lagged
value is correctly specified at degree 1.
265
joining their current university, a dummy variable is
included that captures students’ reason for choosing
their university. It takes the value of 1 if the student
stated in the 2013 wave of the survey that the strong
entrepreneurial reputation of the university was the
most important reason behind the choice of the univer-
sity (0 otherwise).
Third, a set of demographic and student-related var-
iables are controlled for, in line with extant EE impact
studies (e.g., Bergmann et al. 2016; Criaco et al. 2017;
Hahn et al. 2017). As men have been found to be more
attracted towards entrepreneurship than women (Grilo
and Thurik 2008), gender is controlled for and the
variable male is created, coded with a dummy where 1
indicates male and 0 female. Since age may influence
individuals’ predisposition to learn (Minola et al. 2014;
Wilson and McCrystal 2007) and take advantage of EE
(Peterman and Kennedy 2003), the model contains age,
measured in years, as a control variable. As generic
education may contribute to entrepreneurial skills
(Hamilton 2011), students’ level of education is also
controlled for. To do so, a dummy variable is created,
coded 1 for undergraduate (bachelor) students and 1 for
graduate (master) students; more advanced levels of
studies (PhD/doctorate, faculty/post doc, or MBA/
executive education) represent the reference category.
The study also controls for students’ field of study, since
interest and aptitudes towards entrepreneurship might
vary across students of different disciplines (Shinnar
et al. 2009). To do so, the fields of study are grouped
in three broad areas: (1) business and economics, (2)
natural sciences, (3) social sciences. A dummy variable
is created for each study area with the exception of
Bsocial sciences,^ which has been considered as the
reference category. The study also controls for the extent
to which students perceive entrepreneurship to be en-
couraged and supported at their university. To do so, the
variable climate is included, which was measured on the
3-item, 7-point Likert scale used by Bergmann, Geissler,
Hundt, and Grave (2018; α = 0.88).
Fourth, students’ national context is controlled
for, by dividing the European countries to which
the respondents belong into three groups of coun-
tries with relative cultural and linguistic similarity
(cf. Liñán and Fernandez-Serrano 2014): Central
Europe (Austria, Germany, Switzerland), South Eu-
rope (Italy, Spain), and East Europe (Estonia, Hun-
gary, and Poland). A dummy variable is created for
East Europe (equal to 1 if the student is from East
266
Europe, 0 otherwise) and Central Europe (equal to 1
if the student is from Central Europe, 0 otherwise),
with South Europe representing the category of
reference.
Finally, since the students of our sample are
nested in different universities, we controlled for
unobserved university characteristics, which might
affect the dependent variable entrepreneurial skills.
To do so, we introduced university fixed effects.
4 Results
The mean values, standard deviations, and correlations
of all variables used in the empirical analysis are report-
ed in Table 2, while Table 3 displays descriptive statis-
tics of the sample, split into students who never received
EE, who received EE in elective courses, and who
received EE in compulsory courses.
The means reported in Table 2 show that 13.3%
of the students in the sample took EE in compulsory
courses, while 10.3% took EE in elective course. On
average, the self-assessed entrepreneurial skills have
a slight decrease from 2013 (mean = 4.3) to 2016
(mean = 4.1). Almost two-thirds of the students were
undergraduates, and almost half of the sample stud-
ies in the natural sciences discipline. Almost one-
fourth of the sample has self-employed parents. The
presence of self-employed parents is not significant-
ly correlated with students’ participation to elective
and compulsory courses.
In the following regression analyses, the effect of EE
on entrepreneurial skills and the moderation of students’
exposure to an enterprising family are tested by using
moderated hierarchical OLS regression (Cohen and
Cohen 1983). Since the data contain individual-level
observations nested within universities, as in Minola
et al. (2016b), standard errors were clustered by univer-
sity in order to deal with potential correlation of errors at
the university level (Rabe-Hesketh and Skrondal 2008).
Results are displayed in Table 4. It was verified that
variance inflation factors were all below 10 to ensure
that multicollinearity does not cause major concerns to
the analyses (Kennedy 2008).3
3
VIF values above 5 were found only for the dummy variables
bachelor and master because together they cover 96% of the sample
and are thus highly correlated (− 0.90). By dropping the variable
bachelor and keeping undergraduate students as reference category,
VIFs remained below 2 with results substantially unchanged.
D. Hahn et al.
Model 1 contains only control variables. As ex-
pected, students’ entrepreneurial skills in 2016 are
positively associated with the students’ entrepre-
neurial skills in the first wave of the survey. The
positive and statistically significant coefficient asso-
ciated with entrepreneurial intention in 2013 indi-
cates that students with higher entrepreneurial inten-
tions on average experience a greater increase in
their entrepreneurial skills. In addition, the positive
and significant coefficient shows that, all else being
equal, older students on average had higher entre-
preneurial skills in 2016. Similarly, male students
report, on average, higher levels of entrepreneurial
skills than females. Interestingly, controlling for uni-
versity effects, students of business and economics
and students who chose their school because of its
entrepreneurial reputation increase their entrepre-
neurial skills to a greater extent.
Model 2 introduces the independent variable EE (tak-
ing together elective and compulsory courses), which
results not significant. However, in Model 3, which
distinguishes between course types, the coefficients of
EE in elective courses (β = 0.311, p < 0.05) yield positive
and significant results, while the coefficient of compul-
sory EE is positive albeit not significant. This suggests
that the outcomes of EE can be better understood by
disentangling the impact of elective and compulsory
courses. Overall, the results in Models 2 and 3 suggest
that the impact of EE in elective courses goes beyond the
school effect; in contrast, the impact of EE (with elective
and compulsory courses taken together) and of EE in
compulsory courses cannot be disentangled from the
school effect in this specification.4
4
In support to this idea, the model was also run with robust standard
errors, not clustered by university. In this model, the coefficient of EE
was positive and statistically significant (β = 0.203, p < 0.10). More-
over, we run a model without university fixed effects, and it was found
that the coefficients of EE in elective (β = 0.262, p < 0.05) and
compulsory (β = 0.224, p < 0.10) courses were both positive and
statistically significant. To gain further insights into the different effects
produced by EE in elective and in compulsory EE, we also separately
focused on compulsory EE vs. no EE and on elective EE vs. no EE: in
the first case, entrepreneurial skills were regressed on EE in compul-
sory courses, leaving students with no EE as baseline and excluding
from the sample students who received EE in elective courses; in the
latter case, entrepreneurial skills were regressed on EE in elective
courses, leaving students with no EE as baseline and excluding from
the sample students who received EE in compulsory courses. In both
cases, the university fixed effects were included. In these specifica-
tions, the coefficient of EE in elective (β = 0.358, p < 0.05) remains
positive and significant, while the coefficient of compulsory EE re-
mains positive albeit not significant.
Table 2 Construct-level descriptive statistics and correlation of constructs

Variable Means SD (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)

1. Entrepreneurial skills16 4.112 1.290 1

2. Elective EE 0.103 0.304 0.1064 1
3. Compulsory EE 0.133 0.340 0.0736 − 0.133 1
4. Self-employed parents 0.222 0.416 − 0.0046 − 0.0146 0.0053 1
5. PPE 3.848 0.522 0.0227 − 0.0473 0.0549 0.0171 1
6. Experience 1.309 7.973 0.0262 − 0.0306 − 0.0291 0.3073 0.0499 1
7. Nascent entrepreneurial activity 0.035 0.184 0.1935 − 0.0228 0.0747 − 0.0715 − 0.0126 − 0.0314 1
8. Entrepreneurial intention 3.073 1.773 0.4313 0.0629 0.1213 0.0432 0.0149 − 0.0783 0.3309 1
9. Entrepreneurial skills13 4.276 1.262 0.6292 0.1039 0.053 0.0449 0.0406 − 0.0012 0.2004 0.5305
10. Age 25.251 3.526 0.0224 − 0.1138 − 0.1061 − 0.0093 − 0.0878 0.0115 0.0009 − 0.1249
11. Male 0.405 0.491 0.1738 0.0498 − 0.0153 − 0.1318 0.0072 0.0536 0.1016 0.143
12. Bachelor 0.611 0.488 0.0697 0.0491 0.087 − 0.0701 − 0.0103 − 0.0806 0.0478 0.2479
13. Master 0.342 0.475 − 0.0455 − 0.0332 − 0.0797 0.0655 0.059 0.0514 − 0.0571 − 0.2154
14. Business and economics 0.246 0.431 0.1398 0.1284 0.0957 0.0476 0.1367 − 0.0078 0.0387 0.0984
15. Natural sciences 0.525 0.500 0.0072 − 0.0784 0.0841 − 0.0996 − 0.0635 0.0499 − 0.0221 0.0955
16. Entrepreneurial reputation 0.030 0.172 0.1176 0.0296 0.0908 0.0363 0.0513 0.2054 0.2623 0.103
17. Climate 3.806 1.441 0.2319 0.1455 0.0815 0.012 0.0316 − 0.0027 0.1052 0.1888
18. South Europe 0.279 0.449 0.0862 0.0127 − 0.0443 − 0.0562 − 0.0514 − 0.0694 0.0516 0.2679
19. East Europe 0.194 0.396 − 0.0629 0.106 0.3118 − 0.0351 0.0375 − 0.0324 0.0027 0.0461
20. Central Europe 0.527 0.500 − 0.0276 − 0.0954 − 0.2074 0.0783 0.0164 0.088 − 0.0485 − 0.2772

Variable (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16) (17) (18) (19) (20)

1. Entrepreneurial skills16
2. Elective EE
3. Compulsory EE
The impact of entrepreneurship education on university students’’ entrepreneurial skills: a family...

4. Self-employed parents
5. PPE
6. Experience
7. Nascent entrepreneurial activity
8. Entrepreneurial intention
9. Entrepreneurial skills13 1
10. Age − 0.0487 1
11. Male 0.1247 0.0266 1
12. Bachelor 0.0565 − 0.2625 0.0906 1
13. Master − 0.0213 0.173 − 0.0619 − 0.9038 1
267
268 D. Hahn et al.

(20)
In Model 4, the variable self-employed parents and its

1
interaction with EE (in elective and compulsory courses

− 0.5184
grouped together) are added to test moderation. This
variable’s coefficient is not statistically significant. Model
(19)

1
5 further interacts the term self-employed parents sepa-
rately with EE in elective and compulsory courses, and it

− 0.3053
− 0.656
is observed that the coefficients of the interaction terms
(18)

1 compulsory EE × self-employed parents and elective EE ×

self-employed parents are both not statistically significant.
− 0.018

− 0.021
0.0469
Models 6 and 7, instead of having self-employed
(17)

parents as moderator, introduce, respectively, PPE

1

and experience, as well their interactions with EE, as

− 0.0493

− 0.0505

more fine-grained proxies of students’ exposure to an

0.1196
0.087

enterprising family: EE × PPE is not statistically sig-

(16)

nificant; also the interaction between EE and experi-

ence is not significant. Models 8 and 9 then consider
− 0.2163
0.1713
0.0049

0.0897

the interaction of PPE and experience with EE in

0.062
(15)

elective vs. compulsory courses. Model 8 tests the

1

moderation of PPE, distinguishing EE in elective vs.

− 0.0194
− 0.0517
− 0.5999

compulsory courses. Here, the coefficient of the term

0.0571

0.0618
0.102
(14)

compulsory EE × PPE is positive and significant (β =

1

0.240, p < 0.10). Model 9, which tests the moderation

effect of experience, shows that the interaction terms
− 0.0128
− 0.0157

− 0.0737
− 0.1158
− 0.1135

− 0.117
0.1589

with elective and compulsory EE are not statistically

(13)

significant. Finally, Model 10 displays the full model.

It shows that EE in elective courses is positive and
− 0.1494
− 0.0088
− 0.0265

statistically significant (β = 0.436, p < 0.001). This

0.1542

0.0639
0.1164

N = 427. Absolute values of pairwise correlations above 0.10 significant at p < 0.05
0.11
(12)

implies that having taken EE in elective courses is

associated with an increase by 0.345 of the standard
deviation of students’ entrepreneurial skills16. More-
− 0.0171

− 0.0317
− 0.0684
0.1934
0.0759
0.1265
0.1041

over, even though the direct effect of EE in compul-

(11)

sory EE is not statistically significant per se, its inter-

actions with self-employed parents and PPE are sig-
− 0.2198
− 0.2178
− 0.1525
− 0.1117

nificant (respectively, β = − 0.684, p < 0.10 and β =

0.3112
− 0.12
− 0.09
(10)

0.452, p < 0.05). In order to discuss the practical im-

pact of PPE in determining the results of EE in com-
pulsory courses, the marginal effect of compulsory EE
− 0.0029
− 0.0094
0.0299

0.3363
0.0131
0.1295

0.111

on the dependent variable was computed, conditional

(9)

on the level of PPE. The results of this exercise indi-

cate that the effect of compulsory EE is not significant
at lower (i.e., at 1 standard deviation below the mean
16. Entrepreneurial reputation

value of PPE) and average levels of PPE; it becomes

14. Business and economics

positive and significant only at higher levels of PPE

(β = 0.646, p < 0.01; i.e., at 1 standard deviation above
Table 2 (continued)

15. Natural sciences

20. Central Europe

18. South Europe

the mean value of PPE). This implies that, ceteris

19. East Europe

paribus, at higher levels of PPE, EE in compulsory

17. Climate

courses increases students’ entrepreneurial skills by

Variable

0.501 of the standard deviation of students’ entrepre-

neurial skills16.
The impact of entrepreneurship education on university students’’ entrepreneurial skills: a family... 269

Table 3 Descriptive statistics for the sample split on the basis of participation to EE

Variables EE = 0 (N = 324) Elective EE = 1 (N = 44) Compulsory EE = 1 (N = 57)

Mean SD Mean SD Mean SD

Entrepreneurial skills16 3.995 1.306 4.516 1.208 4.353 1.211

Self-employed parents 0.213 0.410 0.204 0.408 0.228 0.423
PPE 3.847 0.548 3.775 0.499 3.921 0.334
Experience 1.395 8.726 0.590 2.060 0.719 4.920
Nascent entrepreneurial activity 0.028 0.164 0.022 0.150 0.070 0.258
Entrepreneurial intention 2.921 1.760 3.401 1.859 3.620 1.608
Entrepreneurial skills13 4.168 1.303 4.662 0.970 4.446 1.204
Age 25.574 3.588 24.068 3.187 24.298 3.023
Male 0.395 0.490 0.477 0.505 0.386 0.491
Bachelor 0.589 0.493 0.681 0.471 0.719 0.453
Master 0.358 0.480 0.295 0.461 0.245 0.434
Business and economics 0.200 0.401 0.409 0.497 0.351 0.481
Natural sciences 0.521 0.500 0.409 0.497 0.631 0.487
Entrepreneurial reputation 0.015 0.123 0.045 0.210 0.070 0.258
Climate 3.672 1.413 4.424 1.426 4.105 1.426
South Europe 0.287 0.453 0.295 0.461 0.228 0.423
East Europe 0.123 0.329 0.318 0.471 0.509 0.504
Central Europe 0.590 0.493 0.386 0.492 0.263 0.444

To facilitate the interpretation of these results,
Fig. 2 plots the relationship between EE in compul-
sory courses and entrepreneurial skills for students
who report lower and higher levels of PPE (i.e., 1
standard deviation below and above the mean val-
ue). The figure shows that the students’ self-assessed
entrepreneurial skills sharply increase only at higher
levels of PPE. Overall, these results underscore the
importance of taking into account PPE in assessing the
compulsory EE-entrepreneurial skills relationship.
4.1 Robustness checks
First, since students in the sample have selected them-
selves into elective EE or into schools that offer com-
pulsory EE, it is necessary to mitigate the concern that
the results are driven by unobservable variables that
drive such selections.5 To do so, a two-stage least
5
Applying the Oster (2017) procedure (cf. Lyons and Zhang 2018),
support is found to the need to control for potential endogeneity due to
unobservables (correlated both to selection into EE and to outcomes of
EE). Additionally, both the Wu-Hausman test and Durbin-Wu-
Hausman statistics reject the null hypothesis that the EE indicator is
not exogenous.
squares approach with instrumental variables (Bascle
2008) was used. To be eligible as an instrument, a
variable should be significantly correlated with the po-
tentially endogenous variable (i.e., EE) but not with the
dependent variable (i.e., entrepreneurial skills 16 ;
Kennedy 2008). Students’ participation to EE was in-
strumented with the variation in percentage points be-
tween 2008 and 2013 in the employment rate of high-
tech and knowledge-intensive sectors in the same re-
gions of the universities (NUTS 2 level) included in the
sample, as reported in Eurostat. To measure the instru-
mental variable at the regional level, a period of multiple
years before students answered to the first survey was
considered; doing so provides a measure of the average
local influences during the years preceding students’
selection of university.6 It is reasonable to assume that
this variable predicts students’ self-selection into elec-
tive EE or into schools that offer EE as compulsory, but
that it is exogenous to students’ increase of entrepre-
neurial skills. In fact, even though employment
6
To measure variables at the local level that might affect students’
entrepreneurial learning, periods of multiple years have already been
used in empirical models aimed at quantitatively assessing the impact
of EE (cf. Hahn et al. 2017).
Table 4 Linear regression with entrepreneurial skills16 as dependent variable
270

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 Model 7 Model 8 Model 9 Model 10

Entrepreneurial skills13 0.545*** 0.540*** 0.541*** 0.541*** 0.542*** 0.540*** 0.540*** 0.544*** 0.541*** 0.548***
(0.062) (0.062) (0.063) (0.062) (0.065) (0.062) (0.061) (0.064) (0.063) (0.067)
Nascent entrepreneurial activity 0.119 0.114 0.141 0.0951 0.128 0.119 0.149 0.173 0.155 0.189
(0.233) (0.230) (0.228) (0.240) (0.233) (0.239) (0.236) (0.243) (0.231) (0.248)
Entrepreneurial intention 0.0722** 0.0720** 0.0711** 0.0747** 0.0766** 0.0716** 0.0715** 0.0665* 0.0726** 0.0723**
(0.033) (0.033) (0.034) (0.035) (0.034) (0.034) (0.033) (0.036) (0.034) (0.036)
Age 0.041** 0.041** 0.042** 0.041** 0.043** 0.042** 0.041** 0.044** 0.043** 0.046**
(0.019) (0.019) (0.019) (0.019) (0.019) (0.019) (0.019) (0.020) (0.019) (0.020)
Male 0.213** 0.210** 0.204** 0.201** 0.196** 0.210** 0.201** 0.197** 0.198** 0.166*
(0.089) (0.089) (0.088) (0.088) (0.087) (0.090) (0.091) (0.088) (0.090) (0.091)
Bachelor 0.034 0.006 0.017 0.000 0.017 − 0.004 − 0.007 0.025 0.025 0.044
(0.190) (0.191) (0.195) (0.194) (0.200) (0.194) (0.185) (0.201) (0.192) (0.205)
Master 0.099 0.064 0.080 0.069 0.090 0.051 0.046 0.079 0.083 0.105
(0.213) (0.222) (0.223) (0.230) (0.230) (0.230) (0.221) (0.231) (0.219) (0.236)
Business and economics 0.408* 0.367 0.381* 0.359 0.380* 0.359 0.373 0.372* 0.380* 0.373*
(0.218) (0.220) (0.217) (0.218) (0.212) (0.218) (0.223) (0.213) (0.218) (0.213)
Natural sciences 0.153 0.140 0.156 0.129 0.151 0.140 0.136 0.157 0.153 0.149
(0.219) (0.217) (0.215) (0.216) (0.212) (0.218) (0.218) (0.215) (0.216) (0.216)
East Europe − 0.16 − 0.279 − 0.251 − 0.286 − 0.21 − 0.286 − 0.27 − 0.251 − 0.243 − 0.186
(0.385) (0.340) (0.350) (0.341) (0.330) (0.338) (0.339) (0.354) (0.350) (0.314)
Central Europe 0.136 0.124 0.142 0.133 0.177 0.114 0.117 0.123 0.133 0.166
(0.336) (0.316) (0.321) (0.320) (0.310) (0.315) (0.314) (0.326) (0.320) (0.311)
Entrepreneurial reputation 0.534* 0.467 0.502* 0.48 0.530* 0.457 0.373 0.491* 0.456 0.513
(0.293) (0.288) (0.273) (0.297) (0.279) (0.293) (0.310) (0.272) (0.302) (0.307)
Climate 0.030 0.025 0.021 0.025 0.021 0.025 0.027 0.022 0.021 0.020
(0.053) (0.053) (0.053) (0.053) (0.054) (0.053) (0.052) (0.052) (0.054) (0.054)
EE 0.203 0.209 0.207 0.220
(0.148) (0.136) (0.153) (0.147)
Elective EE 0.311* 0.346** 0.317* 0.325** 0.436***
(0.165) (0.156) (0.161) (0.156) (0.160)
Compulsory EE 0.124 0.204 0.09 0.128 0.194
(0.169) (0.156) (0.167) (0.169) (0.158)
D. Hahn et al.
Table 4 (continued)

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 Model 7 Model 8 Model 9 Model 10

Self-employed parents − 0.087 − 0.011 − 0.042

(0.115) (0.120) (0.132)
EE × self-employed parents − 0.0176
(0.295)
Elective EE × self-employed parents − 0.154 − 0.361
(0.367) (0.487)
Compulsory EE × self-employed parents − 0.4 − 0.684*
(0.371) (0.376)
PPE 0.0193 0.00546 0.00381
(0.052) (0.050) (0.052)
EE × PPE 0.00796
(0.127)
Experience 0.0141 0.0343 0.0417
(0.027) (0.033) (0.038)
EE × experience 0.233
(0.139)
Elective EE × PPE 0.034 − 0.0515
(0.175) (0.137)
Compulsory EE × PPE 0.240* 0.452**
(0.127) (0.184)
Elective EE × experience 0.101 0.515
(0.214) (0.472)
The impact of entrepreneurship education on university students’’ entrepreneurial skills: a family...

Compulsory EE × experience 0.00489 − 0.0757

(0.072) (0.101)
Constant − 1.268 − 1.237 − 1.41 0.38 0.298 0.373 0.409 0.323 0.336 0.215
(0.952) (0.933) (0.961) (0.731) (0.735) (0.704) (0.722) (0.729) (0.735) (0.743)
Observations 427 427 427 427 427 427 427 427 427 427
R-squared 0.523 0.526 0.527 0.527 0.529 0.526 0.529 0.529 0.528 0.535

Robust standard errors in parentheses. University fixed effects are included in each regression
***p < 0.01, **p < 0.05, *p < 0.1
271
272
Fig. 2 Effect of EE in
compulsory courses on
entrepreneurial skills16 at lower
and higher levels of PPE
Entrepreneurial Skills16
opportunities in high-tech sectors affect the attrac-
tiveness of EE because they raise opportunity costs
for undertaking innovative projects as self-employed
workers (Kacperczyk and Marx 2016), they are like-
ly to be uncorrelated with the acquisition of entre-
preneurial skills, which requires some form of first-
hand exposure to entrepreneurship (Cope 2005; Hahn
et al. 2017), such as direct experience of entrepre-
neurship or a close relationship with entrepreneurs in
the circle of family and friends (Peterman and
Kennedy 2003). By using this instrument, the esti-
mated values of the participation to EE courses were
computed, and those values were used to estimate a
regression model for the entrepreneurial skills vari-
able, as displayed in Table 5.7 Results show that the
overall effect of EE is positive and significant, there-
by supporting a causal identification of the EE im-
pact on entrepreneurial skills.
Second, as an additional robustness check, anal-
ysis shows that self-assessed entrepreneurial skills
represent a perception that has concrete impact on
students’ behaviors (Fayolle and Gailly 2015). Ta-
ble 6 displays odd ratios of the logit regression
model with nascent entrepreneur status in 2016 as
outcome variable. The coefficient for entrepreneur-
ial skills16 is positive and strongly significant (β =
7
In the first stage, using a probit estimator, the EE indicators on the
instrument are regressed to obtain predicted values that contain the
variation in the EE indicators uncorrelated with the error terms. Then,
in the second stage, the dependent variable, entrepreneurial skills, is
regressed on predicted values defined in the first stage, applying a two-
stage least squares estimator. Concerning the instrument relevance,
first-stage estimates suggest that the instrument and the EE indicators
are negatively correlated and that the degree of correlation rises as
university fixed effects are introduced in the first-stage regression.
D. Hahn et al.
5
4
3
No EE Compulsory EE
Low PPE High PPE
1.242, p < 0.01). The coefficient remains positive
and statistically significant even if a more prudent
and strict definition is adopted of the nascent entre-
preneur status, that is, if only concrete activities that
are close to venture creation are considered (i.e.,
BPurchased material, equipment, or machinery for
the business^; BAttempted to obtain external
funding^; BApplied for a patent, copyright, or
trademark^; BRegistered the business^; BSold prod-
uct or service^), rather than activities that may only
be associated with tasks typically required of stu-
dents during EE courses (e.g., write a business
plan). These results further support the importance
for EE to increase students’ self-assessed entrepre-
neurial skills, if its aim is to encourage entrepreneur-
ial activity at university.
Third, to check to what extent the results are
contingent on the European context, the baseline
model is run again on the whole sample of 646
students,8 which also comprehends 18 respondents
from Russia and 201 from Brazil. Results are report-
ed in Table 7. The notable differences with respect
to the baseline results arising from the inclusion of
non-European countries are twofold. First, the effect
of EE in compulsory courses yields significant and
positive results; second, experience in parents’
8
As described in Section 3.1, the complete longitudinal GUESSS
2013–2016 dataset records the answers from 1383 students from 21
countries, but the present analysis includes only questionnaires of those
students who in the 2013 survey reported not having attended EE
before. The sample also excludes students who attended EE in both
elective and compulsory EE, students from countries whose number of
complete responses was below 5, and respondents for whom it was not
possible to build the variables of interest.
The impact of entrepreneurship education on university students’’ entrepreneurial skills: a family... 273

Table 5 2SLS estimation with entrepreneurial skills16 as depen- Table 6 Logistic regression with nascent entrepreneurship in
dent variable 2016 as dependent variable

Entrepreneurial skills13 0.339*** Entrepreneurial skills16 1.202***

(0.123) (0.394)
Nascent entrepreneurial activity13 0.288 Nascent entrepreneurial activity13 0.552
(0.267) (1.013)
Entrepreneurial intention 0.047 Entrepreneurial intention 0.531**
(0.043) (0.249)
Age 0.064*** Age − 0.00375
(0.022) (0.0836)
Male 0.155
Male 0.407
(0.108)
(0.595)
Bachelor − 0.973*
Master 0.390
(0.559)
(0.654)
Master − 1.152*
Business and economics − 0.554
(0.680)
(0.867)
Business and economics − 1.669
Natural sciences − 1.555
(1.105)
(1.015)
Natural sciences − 0.765
(0.489) Entrepreneurial reputation 0.164
Entrepreneurial reputation − 1.386 (1.409)
(1.000) East Europe 2.031**
Climate − 0.203 (0.889)
(0.128) Central Europe 1.187*
East Europe − 2.042** (0.685)
(0.932) EE − 0.0801
Central Europe 0.820 (0.640)
(0.506) Constant − 11.69***
EE 2.197* (2.986)
(1.152)
N = 427; robust standard errors in parentheses
Self-employed parents − 0.694**
***p < 0.01, **p < 0.05, *p < 0.1
(0.316)
PPE 0.198*
(0.108)
Experience 0.248** future research, but extant literature provides some
(0.112) arguments that explain why different outcomes of
Constant 4.682*
EE can be observed in countries with different
(2.826)
socio-economic contexts (Walter and Block 2016).
Observations 427
In developing countries, such as Brazil, the entre-
R-squared 0.53
preneurial career is often seen as a way to overcome
All models are estimated with a two-stage least squares approach unemployment; accordingly, EE will focus on teach-
where the exclusion restriction in the first stage is the variation in ing students the basic skills to become self-
the employment rate in high-tech and knowledge-intensive sectors
employed (Dodd and Hynes 2012). Therefore, EE
at the NUT2 level between 2008 and 2013. Robust standard errors
in parentheses. Estimation with university fixed effects in compulsory courses is more likely be effective
***p < 0.01, **p < 0.05, *p < 0.1 because it raises the interest of larger portions of
students looking at self-employment as a viable job
where other working opportunities are scarce. On
family business negatively moderates the effect of the other hand, in developing areas, EE tends to be
EE in elective courses. Such differences warrant less concerned with imparting the more advanced
Table 7 Linear regression with entrepreneurial skills16 as dependent variable for the whole sample
274

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 Model 7 Model 8 Model 9 Model 10

Entrepreneurial skills13 0.507*** 0.501*** 0.502*** 0.501*** 0.503*** 0.500*** 0.501*** 0.503*** 0.502*** 0.506***
(0.050) (0.050) (0.050) (0.050) (0.051) (0.050) (0.050) (0.050) (0.050) (0.051)
Nascent entrepreneurial activity 0.049 0.039 0.056 0.028 0.038 0.037 0.047 0.079 0.051 0.077
(0.186) (0.186) (0.184) (0.188) (0.183) (0.188) (0.187) (0.185) (0.185) (0.185)
Entrepreneurial intention 0.102*** 0.103*** 0.103*** 0.105*** 0.107*** 0.103*** 0.103*** 0.0995*** 0.105*** 0.103***
(0.035) (0.035) (0.034) (0.035) (0.035) (0.035) (0.035) (0.035) (0.035) (0.035)
Age 0.018 0.018 0.019 0.018 0.019 0.018 0.019 0.019 0.019 0.021
(0.016) (0.016) (0.016) (0.016) (0.016) (0.016) (0.016) (0.016) (0.016) (0.016)
Male 0.203** 0.201** 0.197** 0.198** 0.193** 0.202** 0.200** 0.192** 0.189** 0.174*
(0.090) (0.090) (0.090) (0.090) (0.090) (0.090) (0.090) (0.090) (0.090) (0.091)
Bachelor − 0.160 − 0.168 − 0.164 − 0.165 − 0.160 − 0.182 − 0.167 − 0.169 − 0.165 − 0.158
(0.189) (0.189) (0.191) (0.190) (0.192) (0.190) (0.189) (0.192) (0.191) (0.194)
Master − 0.058 − 0.072 − 0.066 − 0.064 − 0.058 − 0.085 − 0.072 − 0.073 − 0.065 − 0.057
(0.184) (0.184) (0.186) (0.185) (0.187) (0.185) (0.184) (0.187) (0.186) (0.190)
Business and economics 0.229 0.189 0.183 0.186 0.185 0.191 0.189 0.191 0.192 0.211
(0.142) (0.144) (0.144) (0.144) (0.144) (0.144) (0.145) (0.145) (0.145) (0.147)
Natural sciences − 0.052 − 0.066 − 0.059 − 0.070 − 0.055 − 0.061 − 0.064 − 0.051 − 0.055 − 0.037
(0.128) (0.129) (0.129) (0.129) (0.130) (0.128) (0.129) (0.130) (0.130) (0.131)
Entrepreneurial reputation 0.488** 0.446** 0.463** 0.451** 0.479** 0.448** 0.435** 0.443** 0.433** 0.433**
(0.196) (0.195) (0.190) (0.195) (0.189) (0.197) (0.199) (0.194) (0.195) (0.196)
Climate 0.036 0.034 0.031 0.033 0.031 0.034 0.034 0.030 0.032 0.032
(0.035) (0.035) (0.035) (0.036) (0.036) (0.036) (0.036) (0.036) (0.036) (0.037)
East Europe 0.194 0.134 0.093 0.117 0.053 0.122 0.146 0.117 0.112 0.142
(0.390) (0.394) (0.384) (0.398) (0.383) (0.398) (0.400) (0.389) (0.391) (0.394)
Central Europe 0.439 0.454 0.429 0.446 0.393 0.450 0.462 0.445 0.438 0.439
(0.373) (0.374) (0.368) (0.377) (0.366) (0.374) (0.377) (0.370) (0.373) (0.374)
South Europe 0.122 0.134 0.098 0.121 0.046 0.134 0.142 0.115 0.106 0.073
(− 0.401) − 0.399 − 0.393 − 0.401 − 0.390 − 0.398 − 0.403 − 0.395 − 0.398 (0.396)
Russia 0.430 0.341 0.311 0.319 0.244 0.340 0.355 0.349 0.313 0.279
(0.433) (0.438) (0.426) (0.443) (0.432) (0.438) (0.443) (0.428) (0.432) (0.439)
EE 0.158* 0.174 0.160* 0.159*
(0.095) (0.106) (0.095) (0.095)
Elective EE 0.276** 0.332** 0.273** 0.274** 0.298**
(0.126) (0.143) (0.123) (0.126) (0.146)
Compulsory EE (0.155) 0.239** 0.127 0.157 0.237**
D. Hahn et al.
Table 7 (continued)

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 Model 7 Model 8 Model 9 Model 10

(0.110) (0.115) (0.113) (0.110) (0.117)

Self-employed parents − 0.031 0.036 0.025
(0.124) (0.123) (0.132)
EE × self-employed parents − 0.049
(0.221)
Elective EE × self-employed parents − 0.190 − 0.069
(0.299) (0.314)
Compulsory EE × self-employed parents − 0.372 − 0.691**
(0.265) (0.286)
PPE 0.026 0.012 0.014
(0.045) (0.045) (0.045)
EE × PPE − 0.041
(0.089)
Experience 0.007 0.023 0.023
(0.035) (0.036) (0.037)
EE × experience 0.034
(0.115)
Elective EE × PPE − 0.035 − 0.028
(0.109) (0.106)
Compulsory EE × PPE 0.094 0.275**
(0.116) (0.130)
Elective EE × experience − 0.181*** − 0.170***
(0.067) (0.086)
The impact of entrepreneurship education on university students’’ entrepreneurial skills: a family...

Compulsory EE × experience 0.043 0.041

(0.084) (0.095)
Constant − 0.704 − 0.719 − 0.799 0.785 0.722 0.790 0.772 0.758 0.751 0.642
(0.633) (0.631) (0.629) (0.645) (0.639) (0.633) (0.635) (0.636) (0.634) (0.645)
Observations 646 646 646 646 646 646 646 646 646 646
R-squared 0.500 0.502 0.504 0.503 0.506 0.503 0.502 0.505 0.506 0.511

Robust standard errors in parentheses. University fixed effects are included in each regression
***p < 0.01, **p < 0.05, *p < 0.1
275
276
skills required of growth- and innovation-oriented
entrepreneurs (Dodd and Hynes 2012). For this rea-
son, EE in elective courses might be ill-prepared to
satisfy the demand of students who have already
acquired experience in the family business and want
to advance their entrepreneurial skills further.
Fourth, to test for the presence of non-linear effect, a
Ramsey RESET test was implemented. This test did not
permit rejection of the null hypothesis that the model has
no omitted variables (F = 0.38, p > 0.764), thereby
confirming that it was not necessary to introduce qua-
dratic terms of moderators.
Finally, measures have been taken to mitigate the
concern that the results are biased by the heterogeneity
of time passing between the end of a course (between
2013 and 2016) and students’ responding to the survey
to assess their skills (in 2016): since students took EE
during 2013 to 2016 but the dependent variable entre-
preneurial skills16 was assessed in 2016, the students in
the sample have different time horizons after the EE
course in which their skills are measured. It was as-
sumed that, holding field and level of study constant
(which are controlled for), EE is offered at approximate-
ly the same point of the course of studies across cam-
puses. Therefore, by controlling for students’ closeness
to the end of their studies, it should be possible to take
into account students’ heterogeneous time horizons after
taking EE. In particular, a dummy variable called medi-
an was added to the main specification, taking the value
of 1 for students who answered the 2016 survey that will
finish their studies later than the median of the sample
(i.e., 2017). Results remain substantially unchanged.
5 Discussion
A vibrant research stream in entrepreneurship literature
has been focusing on education as a means to promote
mind-sets, attitudes, and behaviors that increase the rate
of enterprising individuals, especially across university
campuses (Martin et al. 2013; Nabi et al. 2017; Rideout
and Gray 2013). The overarching question of this liter-
ature is to what extent and under what circumstances EE
has an impact, with a dominant focus on entrepreneurial
learning, including the development of new entrepre-
neurial knowledge and skills (Hahn et al. 2017; Neck
and Greene 2011). In this respect, this paper explores
some boundary conditions of the education-learning
relationship that have been largely overlooked by extant
D. Hahn et al.
research. More specifically, this study also shows that
the association between EE and entrepreneurial skills
can be better understood by unpacking the audience of
EE into participants to elective and compulsory entre-
preneurship courses. In particular, it finds that the pos-
itive impact of EE exercised on students in elective
courses is rather general and transcends university ef-
fects. In contrast, in compulsory courses, EE augments
the entrepreneurial skills only of those students who
perceive higher levels of performance in their parents’
entrepreneurial activities. By underscoring the role
played by students’ PPE, this study also disentangles
the mechanisms through which the exposure to an en-
terprising family moderates the EE-entrepreneurial
skills relationship.
5.1 Contribution to theory and research
By conceptually and empirically integrating course type
and students’ exposure to an enterprising family in the
assessment of EE impact, the research sheds light on the
pivotal role played by the audience of EE as presenting
key boundary conditions to the effectiveness of educa-
tional interventions aimed at increasing university stu-
dents’ entrepreneurial skills. In fact, while previous
research proposed these as two relevant dimensions that
characterize participants to EE and thus affect the EE-
entrepreneurial skills relationship (e.g., Martin et al.
2013; Nabi et al. 2017; Naia et al. 2014), their actual
and joint influence on the entrepreneurial learning pro-
cess and outcomes remained both theoretically and em-
pirically unveiled. Bearing this in mind, we believe our
work offers several contributions to the current dialog in
EE.
First, the work takes advantage of a quasi-
experimental research design to move towards a recon-
ciliation of the contradictory findings of the vast litera-
ture on EE impact (Martin et al. 2013; Rideout and Gray
2013). The data is longitudinal, the study restricts the
sample to more homogenous countries, and several
factors (e.g., education, intention, skills prior to first
survey) are controlled for. Taken together, these aspects
permit better exploration of the boundary conditions
under which EE is more effective.
Second, the work shows that the effects of EE in
elective and compulsory courses are different. By doing
so, it illustrates that disentangling EE into course type is
important in assessing its outcomes and in understand-
ing the contrasting results produced by extant EE impact
The impact of entrepreneurship education on university students’’ entrepreneurial skills: a family...
studies. In particular, the results endorse the suggestion
of being cautious in generalizing the positive effect of
EE (Nabi et al. 2017; Rauch and Hulsink 2015; Rideout
and Gray 2013). Indeed, while EE in elective courses is
beneficial over university effects, EE in compulsory
courses is beneficial over university effects only for
certain types of students. One possible explanation is
that students taking EE on a voluntary basis are more
motivated to learn from the courses, while audience of
compulsory EE is composed of a mix of students inter-
ested and not interested in entrepreneurship (Karimi
et al. 2016). Additionally, EE in compulsory courses is
usually aimed at imparting students the basic knowledge
about entrepreneurship (von Graevenitz et al. 2010),
whereas elective courses tend to be more specifically
designed for teaching students how to start a business,
combining knowledge from the classroom with hands-
on business experience (Rauch and Hulsink 2015). As
such, students participating to EE in elective courses
have unique opportunities to acquire knowledge and
experience that they could not acquire elsewhere at their
university. In this sense, EE in elective courses does
indeed matter for students’ entrepreneurial learning at
university. At the same time, by showing under which
circumstances EE in compulsory courses can be actually
effective, this paper offers a more nuanced appraisal of
their outcomes.
In fact, as a third contribution, by taking a family
embeddedness perspective on entrepreneurship (Aldrich
and Cliff 2003; Sieger and Minola 2017), the modera-
tion results offer preliminary insights that could contrib-
ute to the literature. This work digs deeper into the
nuances of family embeddedness, offering evidence on
the mechanisms through which such exposure influ-
ences EE outcomes. In particular, this paper comple-
ments previous research (e.g., Peterman and Kennedy
2003) showing that the benefits students reap from EE
do not depend on exposure to self-employed parents as
such but specifically on the nature of such exposure. In
fact, the results indicate that in compulsory courses, only
students with better perceptions of their parents’ entre-
preneurial activity learn from EE. On one hand, PPE
increases the extent to which students are motivated to
learn entrepreneurial skills. For example, PPE is associ-
ated with positive role models (Criaco et al. 2017),
which raise students’ interest towards entrepreneurship.
This can be particularly beneficial to students in com-
pulsory EE, who are, on average, less attracted to entre-
preneurship; as such, PPE powerfully characterizes and
277
discriminates the participants to EE in compulsory
courses. At lower levels of PPE, on the other hand,
students have more likely been exposed to extrinsic
and intrinsic downsides of entrepreneurship, such as
higher level of stress (Uy et al. 2013), financial concerns
(Binder and Coad 2013), and family conflicts (Shepherd
and Haynie 2009). All this will diminish the motivation
to learn. Especially in the context of compulsory
courses, without such motivation, students will not dis-
play significant benefit from EE.
Finally, our work offers a contribution to the growing
literature of student entrepreneurship (Kacperczyk
2013; Minola et al. 2016b). While the results confirm
the importance of the enterprising family as a learning
environment (Hamilton 2011), the paper also advances
the integration of university and family embeddedness
as relevant to the students’ learning process. University
students are uniquely embedded in both contexts that,
when considered together, provide a unique contribution
to explain their entrepreneurial learning.
5.2 Contributions to practice
We believe educators and practitioners could derive
some valuable suggestions from the research. With EE
becoming widespread across campuses, there is a
growing and recognized need of more nuanced
approaches to EE within universities. Building on the
results, teachers and instructors, as well as course
designers, need to be aware of different impacts and
underlying pedagogical mechanisms that result from
compulsory versus elective courses. Moreover, as
recently reinforced by Fayolle (2013) and Nabi et al.
(2017), there is no one EE initiative like another, since
the audience composition and students’ individual pro-
files contribute to determine the learning environment
and its effectiveness. Accounting for the audience (e.g.,
by looking at prior entrepreneurship exposure, such as
that obtained in family business) becomes a stringent
requirement of professionally developed courses. This
becomes even more important in different types of EE
initiatives (such as compulsory rather than elective
courses).
Family business practitioners can also take advantage
of the results. Ensuring that entrepreneurial skills are
acquired by the next generation is central to the pros-
perity and renewal of family businesses to facilitate
intergenerational succession, to spur corporate entrepre-
neurship, and to ensure the transmission of
278
transgenerational entrepreneurship (Jaskiewicz et al.
2015). While the family business represents a valuable
learning environment as such (Hamilton 2011), our
findings suggest that it can also prepare young family
members to take better advantage of and better integrate
learning opportunities outside the family, in particular
formal education ones. In doing so, these students can
represent a valuable resource to the entrepreneurial ac-
tivities developed by their family. For example, they can
act as knowledge brokers and bring into the family
business the more recent developments of entrepreneur-
ial practices learned at university, thereby sustaining
renewal and entrepreneurial development.
Finally, policy makers have been deeply involved in
funding and fostering EE within and outside universi-
ties. As the two boundary conditions proffered here add
a nuanced understanding of the outcomes of EE, policy
makers should encourage students’ interest towards EE
initiatives and, especially in Europe, take advantage of
the prevalence of family businesses in the region when
promoting university-based EE.
5.3 Limitations and future research directions
Despite the contributions offered by this study, it is nec-
essary to note a few limitations. First, the sample presents
some shortcomings. It is not representative of the whole
student population of the selected countries; some of the
students participating to the 2013 wave of the survey were
not reached by the second wave due to different reasons
(e.g., they left the university, their class was not assigned
the survey in 2016); also, the sample could not be explic-
itly tested for non-response bias by identifying early and
late respondents. Even though the use of GUESSS data
presents some limitations, its benefits (e.g., the uniqueness
of the sample and research design in terms of geographical
scope, number of responses, and longitudinal nature),
taken together, have been largely recognized to more than
outweigh its disadvantages in recent research on
university-based entrepreneurship (cf. Criaco et al. 2017;
Laskovaia et al. 2017; Morris et al. 2017).
Second, even though this study explored the effect of
having professional experience in the family business
on the EE-entrepreneurial skills relationship, we obtain-
ed non-significant results; this resonates with the am-
biguous impact of EE programs on participants with
different levels of prior capabilities (Lyons and Zhang
2018). On the one hand, experience leads to greater
ability to process information and better learn from the
D. Hahn et al.
courses (Hahn et al. 2017). On the other hand, students
who already have acquired some background knowl-
edge of entrepreneurship from their prior experience
might not receive additional benefits from the programs
(Fayolle and Gailly 2015). To shed light on this contro-
versy, we recommend future research that more closely
looks at the nature of the course, to offer a better under-
standing of pedagogies and course design that would
allow even students with prior experience to further
increase their entrepreneurial skills. For example, it is
interesting that when students in emerging non-
European countries are included in the sample, analysis
shows that experience reduces the benefits of EE in
elective courses. Since the way entrepreneurship is
taught is known to vary around the world (Dodd and
Hynes 2012), our evidence could be explained by the
fact that in these countries, EE is less adequate to meet
the expectations of students with prior experience who
take EE on a voluntary basis. Unfortunately, in compar-
ing the effect of EE in compulsory versus elective
courses, it was not possible to control for the goals,
content, and specific pedagogy of EE (and how these
differ between compulsory and elective courses in
particular; Fayolle 2013). This would help in validating
the conceptualization and shedding light on the very
specific mechanisms that explain how EE in different
types of courses actually works.
Third, since in quasi-experimental design partici-
pants select themselves to groups of those not taking
EE and taking EE in elective versus compulsory
courses, caution is necessary in inferring causality
from the results; this is only partially mitigated by
introducing a rich set of control variables (Rauch
and Hulsink 2015) and by addressing self-selection
into EE through an instrumental variable approach.
We encourage future research to consider these as-
pects and to integrate methodological rigor with
conceptual richness. Research in this direction, for
example, could combine experimental research de-
sign with the EE teaching model frameworks devel-
oped in literature (cf. Béchard and Grégoire 2005;
Fayolle 2013). Taking advantage of true experiments,
in which students are randomly assigned to different
types of entrepreneurship courses with clearly de-
fined and distinct teaching objectives and peda-
gogies, would allow researchers to formulate recom-
mendations on which type of EE is most suitable to
achieve the intended effects (Naia et al. 2014; Rauch
and Hulsink 2015; Rideout and Gray 2013).
The impact of entrepreneurship education on university students’’ entrepreneurial skills: a family...
Fourth, this study measured EE through binary var-
iables; when combined with the Bboundary conditions^
approach, more nuanced measures of EE (e.g., continu-
ous measures of the number of EE courses taken by the
student or the intensity of exposure to EE measured by
course length) would have the potential to better illus-
trate how human capital accumulates and becomes use-
ful in entrepreneurship (Hahn et al. 2017).
Fifth, due to the survey-based research design, the
present work could not identify how much time passed
between the completion of a course and students’ ex-
post assessment of their skills, which occurred by the
time of the survey. Future research that allows the ob-
servation of students who attended EE just after the end
of the course and for a larger timespan would be wel-
come to draw more accurate conclusions about the
effects of EE and their persistence over time.
Finally, future EE impact studies could also focus on
other outcomes of EE (such as attitude, career intention,
or job market performance over the long run) resulting
from family-university integrated learning or consider
the diversity that might result from the students’ level
(bachelor, master, PhD) or field of study. For example, it
would be particularly interesting to explore whether
self-assessed skills actually correspond to real learning
and allow students to perform entrepreneurial tasks
more effectively. Scholars in EE could also take advan-
tage of emerging issues in the literature of family busi-
ness and enterprising families (Jaskiewicz et al. 2016;
Jaskiewicz et al. 2015), by looking, for example, at how
the student offspring’s gender or the family composition
additionally influence the normative consequences of
family embeddedness. In a similar vein, formal and
informal institutions in the region or the country where
students take EE are likely to influence the knowledge
and social norms that shape the dynamics of EE classes
(Dodd and Hynes 2012; Walter and Dohse 2012). Fol-
lowing this, adding cultural or geographical contextual
dimensions to the university and family embeddedness
of students (both separately and jointly) represents a
promising direction for future research (Leitch et al.
2012; Nabi et al. 2017).
6 Conclusion
Individuals who are endowed with the entrepreneurial
skills required to identify and act on new business oppor-
tunities drive the processes of knowledge spillover and
279
commercialization that are central to economic growth
and innovation. To facilitate the proliferation of these
individuals, universities offer EE aimed at equipping
students with entrepreneurial skills and preparing them
to engage in entrepreneurial activities. However, literature
that assesses the impact of EE on university students
presents contradicting results, which casts some doubts
on the effectiveness of these courses and leads scholars to
explore the boundary conditions under which EE pro-
duces the intended effects. This study contributes to this
debate by focusing on the type of EE and on students’
exposure to an enterprising family as key contingencies of
the EE-entrepreneurial skills relationship. It conceptual-
izes how these factors jointly describe the profile of
participants to entrepreneurship courses, thereby influenc-
ing the heterogeneous outcomes observed by EE impact
studies. Drawing on a sample of 427 university students
who participated to two consecutive waves of the Global
University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey
(GUESSS), the work relies on a quasi-experimental re-
search design to identify the impact of EE in different
types of courses (elective vs. compulsory) on students’
entrepreneurial skills, contingent to participants’ exposure
to entrepreneurship in their families. It finds that partici-
pants to the two types of EE benefit in terms of entrepre-
neurial skills to different extents. In particular, the impact
of compulsory courses is positive only for students with
self-employed parents who perceive their parents to per-
form well as entrepreneurs; conversely, the positive im-
pact of elective courses holds even when university ef-
fects are controlled for. The findings show that both
university and family, two contexts in which students
are socially embedded, jointly influence the acquisition
of entrepreneurial skills among young individuals.
Acknowledgments We would like to thank the organizers and
participants of the Workshop Knowledge Frontiers and Knowl-
edge Boundaries in Europe (Bozen, October 2017) where we
received insightful comments that helped us to refine this paper.
We are grateful also for the suggestions offered at the 28th
Riunione Scientifica Annuale Associazione italiana di Ingegneria
Gestionale (Bari, October 2017), the Technology Transfer Society
Annual Conference (Washington, November 2017), and at the
International Research Conference on Science and Technology
Entrepreneurship Education (Toulouse, April 2017) where earlier
versions of the manuscript have been presented.
Funding information Support for this research was provided
by the BCampus Entrepreneurship^ project, financed by the Uni-
versity of Bergamo through the BExcellence Initiative^ funding
scheme, and by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research
through the BContamination Lab^ funding scheme.
280
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