The Impact of an Entrepreneurship Education Program on Entrepreneurial Competencies and Intention

This study seeks to highlight the key role played by an entrepreneurship education (EE) program on entrepreneurial competencies and intention of secondary students in order to confirm (or disconfirm) conventional wisdom that entrepreneurial education increases the intention to start a business. We used a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design. The results confirm our hypotheses; the students in the experimental group increased their competencies and intention toward self-employment, whereas students in the control group did not. The findings contribute to the theories of planned behavior, and to the literature of EE itself, by revealing the effect of specific benefits for the students derived from the EE program.