Entrepreneurship Education and Its Effect on Entrepreneurial Intentions of Omani Undergraduate Students

Abstract

Entrepreneurial capacity building is one of the important strategies to boost economic growth in general and solve unemployment problems in particular. Governments across the world have taken wider initiatives to encourage entrepreneurship among younger generations. Oman has never been an exception to this phenomenon. It has introduced several initiative and programs to promote entrepreneurship in the Country. One of the important initiatives to promote entrepreneurship came in the year 2015 when the Oman Ministry of Higher Education made it mandatory for all the higher education institution (HEIs) in the Country to introduce a course on Entrepreneurship across all their academic programs. Since the academic year 2015-2016, all the HEIs in the country have been training all their students in entrepreneurship as a national requirement. In this background, the purpose of this paper is to report the effects of entrepreneurship education, which is a national initiative, on the students’ entrepreneurial intention at the Country’s second biggest university, the University of Nizwa. One full cohort of students (N=349) who registered for the University required Entrepreneurship course (MNGT100) at the University of Nizwa, for Fall 2019-2020 Semester was surveyed. The findings show that the entrepreneurial education can positively influence the entrepreneurial intentions of the students. The findings have academic as well as policy implications as strengthening and enhancing entrepreneurship education will further enhance the students’ entrepreneurial intentions.