Students’ Perspective Regarding Entrepreneurial and Startup Education Status in Agricultural Universities

Considering the agriculture sector's progress in the recent years and emergence of new innovative kind of businesses such as agricultural startups, it is compulsory that educational programs are precisely evaluated and especial attention is paid to entrepreneurship and startup education. For this purpose, it is very vital to know the exact current situation of entrepreneurship education in agriculture. Thus, the main objective of this paper was to analyze the entrepreneurial and startup education status in Sari Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources University of Iran through investigating students’ perspectives. In this research, respondents' insights were obtained via following a survey approach. The study instrument was a questionnaire in which its reliability and validity were carefully confirmed. The results indicated that for all components of entrepreneurial and startup knowledge, students scored less than average. Also, only 6.1% of the respondents had high entrepreneurship and startup knowledge; while, 51.3% had moderate, and 42.6% had low knowledge. The average score of less than 3 indicates that the majority of students did not have a positive attitude towards running entrepreneurship and startup activities in the country and found it to be very difficult. The findings pointed out that the students’ families and parents, internets and virtual networks, as well as entrepreneurs were the most important sources of impact on starting new startups or entrepreneurship activities by students, respectively. According to the results, in students' opinion the importance of entrepreneurship curriculum was significantly higher than its degree of performance. Similarly, there was a statistically significant difference between importance level and implementation level regarding the entrepreneurship and startup programs. The conclusions of this analysis could provide a valuable starting point for educational policies and promoting entrepreneurial skills in agricultural universities.