Effects of Entrepreneurship Education on the Entrepreneurial Identity Aspirations – the Context of Indi

When in the early 1960s, economic growth accounting studies found it difficult to explain the growth of the United States economy using the traditional factors of production; physical capital, land, labour, and management (Schultz, 2020) proposed 'Human Capital' as a factor of production explaining the residual factor in the previous studies. Formerly, the idea of thinking of human beings as capital goods was considered offensive. With this, the term "capital" became multi-dimensional. Consequently, the expenditures incurred on education and schooling were started to be seen as an investment in the labour force, which increased individuals and organisations' productivity, concurrently encouraging growth and development at national and international levels (Nafukho et al., 2004). Education is now seen as a tool to prepare the future workforce. So, when the prime minister of India announced his flagship project of make in India, he emphasized the role of entrepreneurship to make India self-reliant. An entrepreneur is a form of human capital that creates new organisations, and in the process of creating and running such an organisation bears most of the risks and enjoys most of the rewards. Therefore, an entrepreneur is seen as an innovator who implements new goods, services, or business processes. With such an emphasized role of entrepreneurs in the economy, there has been a steady increase in educational programs aiming to inculcate the idea of entrepreneurship in the country's human capital educating students on entrepreneurship. These new programs are in stark contrast to India's conventional educational programs such as MBBS, B.Tech, BBA, and MBA, which most students pursue in India. With my master's thesis, I aim to answer whether such entrepreneurship education programs affect the entrepreneurial identity aspirations amongst the workforce in India. Entrepreneurship identity aspiration refers to a possible but unrealized desire to become a future entrepreneur who possesses motivational thoughts and actions to fulfil such desire. The study uses survey as a methodology and gather 103 respondents from two major metro cities in India – Delhi and Mumbai. The 13-question survey was filled using convenience sampling and majority of the respondents were university students in India. It was concluded in this research that entrepreneurship education effect on entrepreneurship identity aspirations were positive in the context of India. Although stronger evidence was found that the influence of parents is dominant in respondents rather than entrepreneurship education when it comes to entrepreneurship identity development.