The study, conducted by Maryam Begum and Muhammad Naeem Butt of the University of Peshawar together with Sabeeh Ullah of The University of Agriculture Peshawar, surveyed 161 business students drawn from five public sector universities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The researchers used partial least squares structural equation modeling, a statistical technique well suited to testing networks of relationships between psychological and behavioral constructs, to trace how entrepreneurship education translates — or fails to translate — into entrepreneurial intention, the self-declared plan to launch a venture at some point in the future.

The headline finding is striking in its negative result. The direct association between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention was positive but statistically insignificant. In plain terms, students who had taken entrepreneurship courses were not meaningfully more likely to say they intended to become entrepreneurs than students who had not absorbed the same material in a way that changed them. This echoes a persistent puzzle in the field: decades of research, stretching back to early reviews of entrepreneurship education in the late 1990s, have produced mixed evidence about whether classroom instruction reliably produces founders. Some studies report strong effects, others weak ones, and a few even find that courses can dampen enthusiasm by revealing how difficult entrepreneurship really is.

But the Pakistani data reveal why the direct path is so weak. When the researchers inserted entrepreneurial capacity into their model as a mediating variable, the picture transformed. Entrepreneurial capacity — a construct formalized in the entrepreneurship literature to describe a person’s accumulated ability to recognize opportunities, mobilize resources and act on them — fully mediated the relationship between education and intention. Education did not push students toward entrepreneurship directly; it pushed them toward entrepreneurship only insofar as it built their capacity. Once that indirect pathway was accounted for, the direct link between coursework and intention vanished entirely. The practical implication is profound: the value of an entrepreneurship program lies not in its content delivery but in its capacity-building effect.

This finding aligns with a competency-based view of entrepreneurship education that has gained traction over the past decade. Scholars such as Morris and colleagues have argued that entrepreneurship is best taught as a set of learnable competencies rather than as a body of facts to memorize. Studies from Vietnam, China and elsewhere have similarly identified mediating mechanisms — self-efficacy, learning orientation, mindset — that carry the influence of education toward intention. The Pakistani study adds entrepreneurial capacity to this list and, crucially, shows that the mediation is complete rather than partial. Nothing leaks around the capacity mechanism. If a course fails to build capability, it fails to build founders.

The second major discovery concerns the environment in which that capacity building takes place. The researchers tested institutional climate — the entrepreneurial atmosphere of a university, encompassing role models, support structures, encouragement of risk-taking and the visibility of entrepreneurial activity on campus — as a moderator of the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial capacity. The moderation was confirmed. In other words, the same course can produce very different gains in capacity depending on the institutional soil in which it is planted. A lecture series delivered in a university with a vibrant entrepreneurial climate, where students see peers launching ventures and faculty championing innovation, builds capacity more effectively than the identical curriculum delivered in a sterile institutional setting.

This moderating role resonates with earlier work on university entrepreneurial climates, including research published in Research Policy showing that higher education institutions differ systematically in how supportive their climates are for entrepreneurship, and studies from African and Asian contexts demonstrating that institutional context conditions the outcomes of entrepreneurship education. The theoretical backbone of the new study is the theory of planned behavior, Icek Ajzen’s influential framework holding that intentions — the best single predictor of deliberate behavior — are shaped by attitudes, perceived social pressure and perceived behavioral control. Entrepreneurial capacity maps closely onto that third element: a student who feels capable of executing a venture is a student whose perceived control, and therefore intention, rises.

The context of the study matters for interpreting its significance. Pakistan is a country with a young population, acute unemployment pressures and a policy push to embed entrepreneurship education across its higher education sector. Previous research has documented entrepreneurial intentions among Pakistani students since at least the early 2010s, and recent reviews of the country’s entrepreneurial ecosystem have highlighted persistent gaps in finance, education and human capital. Against that backdrop, the finding that coursework alone is insufficient carries real weight for policymakers. The authors argue that their results necessitate a redesign of curricula to include practical, experiential learning approaches, and they call for government support to strengthen entrepreneurship education within Pakistani higher education institutions.

Experiential learning is the operative phrase. A systematic review of experiential approaches in entrepreneurship education has documented a global shift away from lecture-based instruction toward methods that immerse students in real venture creation, simulation, live case work and interaction with practicing entrepreneurs. Studies applying experiential learning theory to entrepreneurship teaching have found that students who practice entrepreneurial behaviors, rather than merely reading about them, show stronger gains in the self-efficacy and capability that drive intention. The Pakistani results give this movement fresh empirical ammunition, particularly for developing economies where entrepreneurship education is often delivered through traditional classroom formats inherited from general business curricula.

The study is not without limitations that readers should bear in mind. The sample of 161 business students from five public universities in a single Pakistani province is modest, and cross-sectional survey data cannot prove causation with certainty; it remains possible that students with higher capacity seek out more entrepreneurship education rather than the reverse. Self-reported intentions are also an imperfect proxy for actual founding behavior, which depends on opportunity, capital and family circumstances that no survey can capture. Common method bias — the risk that correlations inflate when all variables come from the same questionnaire — was assessed using established full collinearity procedures, but the underlying constraints of the design remain.

Even so, the core message travels well beyond Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. For universities everywhere investing in startup incubators, entrepreneurship minors and innovation certificates, the study delivers a two-part test. First, does the program demonstrably build entrepreneurial capacity — the skills, knowledge and confidence to act? Second, does the wider institutional climate amplify that building process rather than neutralize it? Programs that fail either test, the evidence suggests, will produce graduates who can define opportunity recognition on an exam but never intend to act on it. The future of entrepreneurship education, this research implies, belongs not to the lecture hall but to the campus ecosystem that turns instruction into capability, and capability into the ambition to build something of one’s own.

Subject of Research: The effect of entrepreneurship education on student entrepreneurial intentions through entrepreneurial capacity and institutional climate

Article Title: Unveiling the dynamics of entrepreneurship education: how entrepreneurial capacity and institutional climate shape student intentions

Article References: Begum, M., Ullah, S., & Butt, M. N. (2026). Unveiling the dynamics of entrepreneurship education: how entrepreneurial capacity and institutional climate shape student intentions. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 419. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01719-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01719-8

Keywords: entrepreneurship education, entrepreneurial intentions, entrepreneurial capacity, institutional climate, higher education, PLS-SEM, Pakistan, business students, experiential learning, theory of planned behavior, university ecosystem, curriculum design