Abstract:

This paper aims to provide an insight into the current state of entrepreneurship education in Romania compared to other European countries. After a synthetic overview of the most important theories in the literature on entrepreneurial education and some secondary data analysis from recent statistical research on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial education in view of European and Romanian students, youth, entrepreneurs or simply citizens, the paper will focus on our own research consisting in a content analysis of curricula available on the Romanian universities websites, in order to identify the situation of the entrepreneurship curricula in our universities.

Insufficient information about how to start a business are considered by about a half of young Europeans as an important obstacle to entrepreneurship, after lack of financial support and administrative procedures too complex, thus the likelihood of young people to become entrepreneurs depends in a great extent also on the degree of knowledge about how to initiate a business. To stimulate entrepreneurship among young people, universities can contribute to entrepreneurship education by teaching introductory and advanced entrepreneurship courses that build skills required of a good entrepreneur (business administration, marketing, sales, human resources, communications and PR, finances etc.); by creating a system of co-curricular activities supporting entrepreneurship (competitions of business plans, incubators and business accelerators for entrepreneurs in the making, internships, presentations of lecturers from outside the faculty, programs of networking to create links between students on the one hand and mentors and potential investors on the other hands etc.).

In many European countries, entrepreneurship in non-economic faculties is a new issue and in general is still not sufficiently integrated into the curricula of universities. The situation is better in a few countries (such as Germany), while the new Member States have to made much progress yet. European data show that most courses about entrepreneurship are taught in economic and business faculties. More than half of European students don’t have access to entrepreneurship education, so they don’t have the opportunity to participate in a curricular or extra-curricular activity that would stimulate their interest in entrepreneurship.

The results of our research show a consistent and constant concern of Romanian universities for entrepreneurship education, but that is offered strictly for students from the economic faculties, where we identified a wide and varied range of courses in the entrepreneurship area, covering all skills necessary for a start-up entrepreneur. Unfortunately, this type of courses are completely missing in the curricula of non-economic faculties, even at advanced level of master, although non-economic faculties graduates may also want, as a next step in their careers, to start a business in the area in which they graduated (although more than half of Romanian students would prefer in a greater extent to be entrepreneurs and not employees after graduation and most would like to start their own business in the next two years, only about a quarter of Romanian students believe that the faculty is preparing them “in a large extent” to do this). This situation occurs in most other European countries, where the introduction of entrepreneurship education in non-economic faculties is still in its infancy.

Keywords:

Entrepreneurial education, universitary curricula, entrepreneurship courses.