Investigating entrepreneurial intention among public sector university students of Pakistan

Nowadays, entrepreneurship is regarded as an indispensable means for economic development. In this regard, promoting entrepreneurship is a necessity for every economy. The purpose of this paper is to identify factors that may influence students’ entrepreneurial intentions.

The conceptual framework underlying this study is the theory of planned behavior, and the study proposes a descriptive methodology in which cross-sectional data are randomly collected from the different public sector universities of Pakistan. A survey questionnaire was used as a means for data collection. The respondents were bachelor’s as well as master’s degree students who are pursuing degrees in entrepreneurship or education. After cleaning the data, 385 usable answers were analyzed. The response rate was 60 percent. Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 21.0 was used for data analysis.

The results of Pearson’s correlation and multiple regression analysis showed that attitudes toward behavior and subjective norms have a positive and significant relationship with entrepreneurial intention. On the other hand, perceived behavioral control has no significant relationship with entrepreneurial intention.

Such a study may provide useful insights into the state of entrepreneurship education for policy makers and planners in universities as well as in government, regarding the younger generation, particularly, to reduce the burden of graduate unemployment.