Factors Influencing Entrepreneurial Intention of University Students in Nigeria

The rate unemployment and poverty in Nigeria is very alarming, thus policy makers resort to the development of entrepreneurship activities as the only way to address it. As a result, the importance of inspiring students on the prospects of being entrepreneurs was understood by both developed and developing countries. This study built on the assumptions of Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) model to address the issues of entrepreneurship intention, with three independent variables i.e. attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control, and entrepreneurial intention as the dependent variable. The study consists of 794 students who were taught an entrepreneurship education course in their third year. This study used samples of 293 that were drawn from the population for the purpose undertaking a survey. After data screening, 32 cases of univariate outliers with Z-score >3.29 have been deleted, multivariate outlier was gauged using the Mahalanobis distance method and no case was recorded with > 41.34. There was no incidence of Multicollinearity and the Cronbach’s alpha for each of the variables is > 0.70. The result of regression analysis indicates that only attitude had significant positive relationship with entrepreneurial intention of the Students, While Subjective Norms And Perceived Behavioural Control Are Not significantly related to entrepreneurial intention. Policy makers are to focus more on enhancing the entrepreneurial attitude of students in the undergraduate’s entrepreneurship syllabus. Future researchers can use longitudinal studies to determine the exact relationship between entrepreneurship intention and entrepreneurship behaviour over time