A study of entrepreneurship subject (ETR 300) on UiTM Kedah students' intention to start a business / Law Kuan Kheng ... [et al.]

The main purpose of the study is to investigate the impact of entrepreneurship
education (ETR 300) on students' inclination to start a business. We believe that a
proper entrepreneurship education would be able to instil! interest in the students to
start a business. Therefore, a study was conducted to verify whether ETR 300 served
its objective of providing the necessary knowledge and motivation for the UiTM Kedah
students to start a business was felt to be timely. This is also in line with the
government's efforts to promote entrepreneurship as an alternative for our graduates
to be self-employed rather than competing for a job in a tight labour market.
The scope of the study was limited to students in UiTM Kedah taking the
subject of ETR 300 consisting of 141 respondents. The research instrument drafted
was named the Students' Entrepreneurial Index, SE! which consists of 39 items that
designed to tap into the three dimensions of entrepreneurship readiness: (a)
Entrepreneurial Inclination; (b) Contextual Factors; and (c) Desirability of Control.
The findings of this study suggested that the ETR 300 subject was able to
enhance the entrepreneurial inclination among the students. Nevertheless, students'
high achievement grade in the final examination of ETR 300 subject had no significant
relationship with their entrepreneurial inclination.
The findings also revealed that gender did make a difference in their
entrepreneurial inclination. Furthermore, it was found that the effect of previous
exposure to entrepreneurship i.e. family business involvement contributed
significantly to the difference in the mean score for SE! as well as its subscales.
In conclusion, this study showed that ETR 300 was able to instil! in the
students their intention to start a business. It is suggested that the university should
seriously look into the feasibility of making enterprise education compulsory to all
students of UiTM to mould a greater number of students to be interested and
enthusiastic to start their own business after graduation.