Abstract:

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) promotes the entrepreneurship and employability. The entrepreneurship is one of the three goals of the process of European convergence in the EHEA (Law of Coordination of Valencia University System, Law 4/2007, February the 9th, LCV 2007\79) and has been promoted in all the European educational contexts and strategies (of political reform Martin & Iucu, 2014). The University programs should be structured considering entrepreneurship as curricular content (Al-Atabi & DeBoer, 2014). One of the elements of the entrepreneurship in order to foster and evaluate it is the system of values; specifically the values of power and achievement (Llinares, González, Zurriaga & Córdoba, 2015). The main goal of the current work is to analyse the system of values in a study of 306 students at the University of Valencia (2nd, 3rd and 4th grade), their differences with 25 entrepreneurs and their development along the university period. For this purpose, individuals completed the Schwartz Value Survey (2007). The results show that university students in the last grade prioritize values of self-direction and achievement. On the contrary, entrepreneurs prioritize more values of self-direction and less values of achievement. Along the university studies specifically the relevance of values of security and universalism decrease significantly; as well as tradition, benevolence, conformity and self-direction. Results suggest that neoliberalism has strongly influenced on current values of university students and the university education. The presentation provides a critical debate of the results about entrepreneurship values and the education on entrepreneurship values in University; the entrepreneurship values are linked to the care to the other (social welfare), to the environment and the maintenance of culture. The profile of good citizen that promotes self-transcendence and security values is the contrary to the entrepreneurial profile. It promotes self-benefiting values (values that motivate further their own interests) and minimizes self-transcendence values (values that motivate to transcend selfish concerns and to promote the welfare of the others and nature). Finally, we emphasize the importance of these issues in the educational planning.

Keywords:

Entrepreneurship, values, higher education, entrepreneurship education.