Measuring and Understanding the Effects of Entrepreneurial Awareness Education

The widespread rise in entrepreneurship education at universities is frequently not accompanied by rigorous and sustainable program evaluations. Thus, the impact of these programs is still under dispute. In order to enhance this understanding, we derive an entrepreneurship education model (EEM) following Linan and Chen's modification of Ajzen's theory of planned behavior and use it as a mixed methods evaluation tool in an awareness education setting at a large German university. We find support for the proposed causal link from awareness education to students' entrepreneurial attitudes derived in the EEM and that perceived control over entrepreneurial tasks is not a relevant predictor of start-up intentions in an awareness setting. Further, we observe two course-induced effects on students' belief systems determining their personal attitude: the corruption effect of extrinsic motivation and a shift in locus of control.