Identifying and Ranking the Barriers of Students’ Entrepreneurship in Higher Education System (From the Viewpoint of Faculty Members of Zanjan University)

Entrepreneurship development, alongside providing sustainable growth and development, will alleviate current problems including poverty, social and cultural disruption, and the unemployment of university graduates and that of other unemployed people. The current study aims at identifying and categorizing the barriers of students’ entrepreneurship. The research has used a mixed-method design with sequential exploration which was conducted in two qualitative- quantitative part. The qualitative study included ten (N=10) experts and the quantitative study consisted of 228 lecturers who were sampled from the faculty members of Zanjan University, using stratified sampling method. Semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire were used to gather data for the qualitative and the quantitative studies, respectively. To validate the data in qualitative section, interviewees as well as colleagues were asked to review the data. With regard to validation of the questionnaire, content validity and construct validity were used. Reliability of the questionnaire was confirmed by Cronbach's alpha test at 0.925. In order to analyze the research data, we utilized inferential statistical methods of confirmatory exploratory factor analysis. The findings revealed that individual barriers, educational barriers, financial barriers and supportive barriers such as government, regulations and social attitudes were the main barriers to students’ entrepreneurship.