Management Education in India: Establishing the Mainstream Role of Entrepreneurship Education

Abstract

In the past decade, India has become one of the fastest growing economies and has demonstrated a consistent growth in domestic production and domestic consumption. However, the same growth has not been seen when it comes to employment front. Therefore, there is a need to reduce the gap between educated mass and the available supply of jobs in India. This can be successfully bridged by developing entrepreneurial ecosystem through Entrepreneurship education; which is still at a nascent stage in India. It should be noted that the post graduate level is the most crucial and management education is the key growth area for entrepreneurship education. The existing courses associated with business and commerce are mainly intended to prepare the student in an organizational context (Graham & McKenzie, 1995; Gupta 1992). While many measures have been taken by Universities and Government of India to promote entrepreneurship education in the form of ecells, incubators, innovation centers, entrepreneurship institutes etc., however, Entrepreneurship Education as of now is not considered part of the mainstream management education. The lack of entrepreneurship as a mainstream approach to management education can partly be explained due to lack of efficacy measures with respect to entrepreneurship education. In such a case, there is an urgent need to mainstream entrepreneurship education (EE) in Management education in India so that it could become an accepted path towards creating an entrepreneurial mindset among students in next few generations. Recently, at least in an Indian context, the efficacy of EE has been captured by measuring the entrepreneurial intention (EI) among students. For instance, Pandit, Joshi and Tiwari (2018) find that students learning formal entrepreneurship courses tended to have a higher EI score as compared to students who were not exposed to formal entrepreneurship education. This stream of research can be further examined to understand a stronger aspect of EE and its efficacy. We propose that by analyzing the impact of formal entrepreneurship education from different levels of courses, such as, foundation, core and elective courses offered to students at post graduate level. This can further be examined by asking does informal exposure to entrepreneurial education (participation in co-curricular activities). Specifically our research looks at: (1) Impact of process of learning entrepreneurial concepts through entrepreneurship education (2) Moderating Impact of self-participation in entrepreneurial activities during the time they gain management education. The paper follows an action research methodology using a mixed method research design (Quan-Qual research design) over a two-year period initially. Constructs studied include Entrepreneurship Education (EE), Entrepreneurship Intention (EI). Action Research is to be conducted in this study in order to measure three levels of progress i.e. awareness, education and acceleration. Pre and Post impact of Entrepreneurship education (EE) on entrepreneurial intention (EI) is be measured to validate the study. A two year study conducted for academic year 2017-19 and 2018-20 with a sample of 323 management students from Fortune Institute of International Business (FIIB), Delhi. The following table highlights the student’s enrolment at FIIB for the last three years for the Entrepreneurship courses. Once the students graduate, we will track them for their entrepreneurial activities and interview them at a later point.