Entrepreneurship Education and Self-employment

Over the years, Nigeria is experiencing a decline in the general standard of living largely due to poverty and unemployment among its citizens. Despite the numerous measures taken by the government to empower students to create jobs through entrepreneurship programme, the rising rate of unemployment in Nigeria is still a concern. The broad objective of the study was to examine the perception and attitudes of final year students toward entrepreneurship education and self-employment. The study adopted a descriptive cross-sectional survey research design. A total of 374 participants, final year male and female students of different social and economic backgrounds across various departments were recruited into the study using stratified sampling technique. The reliability of the research instrument was determined using Cronbach’s alpha which gave a result of (α=0.692). The findings revealed final year students’ current involvement on self-employment activity is very low and also, that there is gender differences in students’ job preference after graduation with female students less interested in self-employment and more interested in government/private sector employment.