Mark Pruett presents paper at the annual meeting of the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship
Mark Pruett, associate professor of management in the George Dean Johnson, Jr. College of Business and Economics, presented a paper at the annual meeting of the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) in San Francisco, held January 10-13, 2013. The paper is the latest in a series of studies of entrepreneurship education, and is titled, “Do they think the same? A six-country study of faculty perceptions of student beliefs and attitudes about entrepreneurship.”
Pruett wrote the study with co-author Harun Şeşen, a management professor at the Turkish Military Academy, who recently spent a six-month sabbatical at USC Upstate working with Pruett on research. They compared faculty and student responses regarding curricula, university setting, students’ career intentions and entrepreneurial disposition, and motives and barriers for start-up businesses. They found that that the misalignments are widespread and significant across the various countries we studied. That is, faculty do not always accurately perceive student aspirations and beliefs. This may pose a challenge not only for entrepreneurship education, but for education across a university. The authors also conclude that a student’s level of risk-aversion and fear of failure play a significant role in student career intentions and aspirations.