INFLUENCE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION ON CAREER ASPIRATION OF AGRICULTURE UNDERGRADUATES IN RIVERS STATE

Abstract

The study identified the influence of entrepreneurship education on career aspiration of agriculture undergraduates in Rivers State. Two stage sampling procedure was used to select 94 final year undergraduates for the study. Data was collected using structured questionnaire and analyzed with both descriptive and inferential statistical tools. Findings show that minimal take off fund (88%), desire to develop entrepreneurship skills (87%), low level of mechanization (81%), intrinsic desire for the career (74%), less difficulty to access agric. fund (68%), social status of those already in agric. career (67%) and family and environmental factors (60%) were major factors influencing students’ career aspirations. The major influences of entrepreneurship education on students’ career aspiration include developing creativity in students (= 3.4), increasing students’ self-confidence ( = 3.5), aiding financial management (= 3.5), becoming entrepreneurial oriented (= 3.6) and increasing students’ ambition of being self-employed (= 3.5). Binary logit regression result showed that a significant relationship exists between the agric. undergraduate’s demographic characteristics and their choice of career while the Ordinary least square regression analysis also showed that a significant relationship exists between the student’s perception of career in agriculture and their demographic characteristics with an f-value of 14.161 which was significant at both 0.01 and 0.05 probability level and overall p-value of 0.000. It was recommended that entrepreneurship courses be made more practical, government should give soft agricultural loans, proper orientation be given to students at the secondary school level to boost their interest in agricultural careers.