Opportunities to Improve Entrepreneurship Education: Contributions Considering Brazilian Challenges

This paper identifies challenges and opportunities for enhancing higher education in entrepreneurship considering student perceptions concerning both their demand for entrepreneurship education and their entrepreneurial intention as well as previous studies that present the points of view of experts. The main focus is Brazilian higher education, but the results address challenges that cross borders, such as the need for a practical approach. The study analyzed the data from the Brazilian version of the 2011 lobal niversity ntrepreneurial pirit tudents' urvey () obtained with an online questionnaire answered by 25, 751 razilian students from 37 colleges and universities. To give a reference for a better understanding of razilian statistics, data were compared to those of the 2011 international involving also 25 other countries and 64, 079 responses from them. Three hypotheses were tested. The results show that entrepreneurship education has a significant negative effect on student entrepreneurial intention and also on self‐efficacy. The same occurs between entrepreneurial intention and students' demand for entrepreneurship education. razilian students present higher levels of entrepreneurial intention and are significantly more motivated to take courses and activities in entrepreneurship than those students in the international sample. Approximately 50 percent of razilian students are potential entrepreneurs. One of the opportunities identified is to take advantage of students' positive attitudes and their high demand. The opportunities could play an important role in overcoming the challenges recognized, among which are the need for a more practical approach and the need for larger and diversified educational offerings beyond business planning. The challenges make eck and reene's recommendations, presented in a 2011 issue of , particularly important for razil. The last three sections propose different explanations, suggestions for more research, and practical recommendations.