UC Riverside

The proliferation of entrepreneurship education in higher education institutions has been fueled by the pressure to promote the economy and educate a new workforce who can be agile workers moving between an employee and self-employed (Fayolle & Gailly, 2015; Navi et al., 2017). As a result, entrepreneurship education, which refers to education aims to enhance entrepreneurial knowledge to encourage students' entrepreneurial behaviors, has more than quadrupled in the past few decades in the U.S. With the surge of entrepreneurship education, scholars grew interested in the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education promoting students' entrepreneurial intention, which refers to an individual's aspiration to pursue entrepreneurship. However, current literature lacks students' narratives describing their perspectives on entrepreneurship education and factors influencing their entrepreneurial intention.Using the Theory of Planned Behavior and its three intention antecedents: attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control and pattern-matching analysis, this study explores factors that influence changes in TPB's three antecedents of intention. This investigation includes 31 pre-and post-course semi-structured interviews with 15 students who take entrepreneurship education courses at the undergraduate and graduate level to investigate students' lived experiences in an entrepreneurship course. The findings indicate that knowledge, social observation, and class experience influence students' entrepreneurial intention. The present study's findings shed light on the existing literature by shifting the research focus from the outcome of entrepreneurship education as a result of changes in students' entrepreneurial intentions to identifying factors driving any changes in students' entrepreneurial intentions. In addition, the present study makes methodological implications by adding a qualitative study in entrepreneurship education research and provides suggestions for entrepreneurship education practices.