Student is boss: A study on facets and effects of entrepreneurship student satisfaction

Abstract: This thesis concerns entrepreneurship education and its value for knowledge development among individual students. Didactic theory assumes that satisfaction is strongly linked to the perceived factual benefits and knowledge utilization of education efforts, but so far this assumption has not been tested in an entrepreneurship education setting. This thesis therefore aims to identify, describe and analyse focal factors of entrepreneurship student satisfaction and potential effects thereof.Two empirical studies constitute the thesis, both based on data collected from students in an advanced entrepreneurship programme. Bivariate and multivariate statistics were used to investigate the relationship between entrepreneurship education satisfaction among students, its factors and effects. Both approaches indicate that student satisfaction was strongly related to perceived knowledge development and future career value among individual students, regardless of whether these individuals become entrepreneurs or not. Findings also show that the most important factors of entrepreneurship student satisfaction were courses’ perceived value for future career and their fulfilment of intended learning outcomes.It is believed that these findings will contribute to the study of entrepreneurship education practice. Two areas are left outside the scope of this study that would be of interest for the future: (i) the quality of the entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial outcomes from education, and (ii) the potential effects of non-satisfaction.