Entrepreneurial competencies in higher education

Abstract

© 2019, Allied Business Academies. All rights reserved. Entrepreneurship education has a great success in education field. During the last decades, it became widely spread in the USA, Asian and European countries. As a result, the number of various pedagogic approaches and courses that are devoted to the field-specific themes within entrepreneurial activity, drastically increased. Nevertheless, the majority of the existing programs and techniques in different countries (including Russian Federation) have some deficiencies in their theoretical and practical parts that influence the students’ attitude towards entrepreneurial activity. That is why, they need to be corrected. Guided by this purpose, the authors conducted a survey to identify the students’ attitude towards entrepreneurial activity and the level of their readiness to participate in it. Besides, the purpose of the research was to reveal the deficiencies of educational programs that can result in the students’ lack of readiness for entrepreneurial activity. The research is oriented towards the audience that is more universal in its composition. This will allow to reveal general problem that characterizes the domestic education. That is why, the research was conducted in different universities of four Russian cities. The survey was focused upon three aspects: the students’ attitude towards entrepreneurship, the factors of their business-development and the students’ evaluation of the practical and theoretical content of education programs in universities. 710 four-year students took part in the survey. The results of the research pointed to the students’ general lack of readiness for entrepreneurial activity. Besides, the research allowed to identify a low effectiveness level of education programs as the reason of this situation. It is conditioned by a small number of field-specific disciplines, by the absence of the programs and probations, by the lack of techniques that develop entrepreneurial spirit. These results will allow the administration of higher education institutions to revise all the critical remarks that were formulated by the students, to introduce the lacking techniques, to correct the content of the education program in order to exclude the disciplines that do not directly relate to the students’ specialization and to address the problem of the advanced training of the faculty staff in order to increase the quality of the education process.