The impact of entrepreneurship education on the entrepreneurial intention of students in science and engineering versus business studies university programs

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Entrepreneurship education Entrepreneurial intention Student entrepreneurship Technology entrepreneurship Theory of planned behavior TPB Academic research has shown that Entrepreneurship Education (EE) increases Entrepreneurial Intention (EI). However, this does not happen uniformly in all contexts, as specific contexts may require different EE action. In this paper the authors investigate the context-specific questions in two separate categories of students. If context is important, we should see different outcomes from similar EE classes provided to different student groups. The authors' results suggest that there is a contextual difference. The results indicate that EE modified to suit a particular target group could address the issue of subjective norms separately for business students and science and engineering students. Their principal results show that EE is generally effective for business students and science and engineering students. However, the EI of science and engineering students is actually negatively affected by subjective norms, whereas that effect is not apparent among the business student sample. The authors suggest that future research is needed on effective didactic approaches in EE for science and engineering students. The importance of entrepreneurship to society has been identified and discussed since at least the fifteenth century (Schumpeter, 1912), and that discussion remains topical (Kirchhoff et al., 2013; Grichnik and Harms, 2007). The questions of whether and how entrepreneurial skills and competences can be fostered during education were posed by Cotrugli (1990), and later followed up by Cantillon (1931). From these historical roots, Entrepreneurship Education (EE) has evolved to become a prominent field. This field is born of diverse disciplines, which include economics, management, education, and technical studies (Davidsson, 2008). The authors embrace the concept that EE is based on the realization that successful entrepreneurship is positively affected by the disposi-tions, skills, and competences of the founders of an enterprise (Rauch et al., 2005; Unger et al., 2011). We suggest that these dispositions, skills, and competences can be shaped by education (Kuratko, 2005), and cite recent meta-analyses (Bae et al., 2014; Martin et al., 2013) indicating that EE is generally effective. We seek to enhance the knowledge in this field by investigating the outstanding question of what makes EE effective, and for whom. The question of " what makes EE effective " has been discussed in a literature stream on intention-based models for entrepreneurship education (Kuehn, 2008). Kuehn (2008, p. 87) states: " …