Factors that affect a final year student's decision to become an entrepreneur

Abstract

In this study we have tried to examine the factors that affect a final year student’s decision to start their own business after graduating. Factors like past work experience, attitude, major source of parent’s income, academic performance, business experience, school of the student, awareness of entrepreneurship agency and attendance of entrepreneurship programme were considered in the study. The objectives of the study were to determine whether academic intelligence of a student has influence on his entrepreneurial intentions, to determine whether student’s previous work experience has influence on his or her entrepreneurial inclination, to establish the relationship between sex and entrepreneurship, to establish whether parent’s job or major source of income has influence on entrepreneurial inclination of their children, to determine the average amount of capital that a final year student would need to start their own business, to determine the level of awareness of different entrepreneurial programmes amongst final year students and to establish the relationship between the schools of a student offered at COBAMs and entrepreneurial It is a quantitative study based on a sample of 393 final year students from the three schools of college of business and management sciences and data was collected using structured questionnaires. The male to female ratio of this study is 196 to 197. Data was captured using epidata and later exported to excel and STATA for analysis to test the research hypotheses. Analysis was done using frequency tables and bar graphs, chi-square, ANOVA and ordinal regression and the results showed that the school of the student and his or her entrepreneurial inclination are dependent, the academic performance of the student has got no relationship with the intentions of the student to become an entrepreneur after completing his or her degree and prior experience of the student in business has influence on the student’s intentions to take up entrepreneurship as a career option; students who had earlier experience of doing business were seen to be more inclined towards taking up entrepreneurship as a career choice indicating good experience and feasible business environment.