An evaluation of the entrepreneurship education in Indonesia: a case study of Bengkulu University

Since the last couple years, entrepreneurship education have become a popular program in most universities in Indonesia. This paper presents partial results of a research designed to evaluate the entrepreneurship education in Bengkulu University, Indonesia. The research has four main objectives: (a) to evaluate the development of entrepreneurship education at the Bengkulu University, (b) to investigate students’ opinion on the entrepreneurship education and their satisfaction with the provision of entrepreneurship subject, (c) to identify strengths and weaknesses of the existing practice of the entrepreneurship education, and (d) to provide recommendations for the future. This study used secondary data and primary data collected from 15 lecturers of entrepreneurship subject and 333 students consisting of 189 new students and 144 who already undertook and passed the entrepreneurship subject. Data were analyzed using descriptive analysis techniques and SatMat model developed by Abduh, D’Souza, Burley and Quazi (2007) for assessing and classifying students’ satisfaction level. The results suggest that the entrepreneurship education in the Bengkulu University is getting progress as the number of students interested in to become an entrepreneur has increased overtime as well as the number of entrepreneurship lecturers. However, there were some weaknesses of the existing practice of the entrepreneurship education, including: a low level of students’ satisfaction on some kinds of subject materials, teaching methods and outcomes expected from the subjects, and lack of coordination between related units. Based on the results, an integrated framework named as Center for Student Entrepreneurship Development and Business Incubation Program (CSED-BIP) was proposed and recommended to improve the effectiveness of the entrepreneurship education in the university in the future.