2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Undergraduate students in engineering fields continue to gain exposure to entrepreneurial programming through different entrepreneurship education programs (EEPs) initiated in institutions of higher education. While traditionally entrepreneurship education has been initiated and housed in the business school, recent programmatic offerings have increased in the engineering schools. Through a variety of offerings (e.g., full-credit courses and seminars), engineering EEPs focus on the development of entrepreneurially minded engineering graduates to prepare them to succeed in their future career roles. While research in entrepreneurship education has demonstrated the positive impact of EEPs, there is lack of understanding about students who enroll in these EEPs. Specifically, because students often self-select into different EEP programmatic offerings, differences in students who participate in the different programmatic offerings (i.e., business, engineering, seminar EEPs) need research examination. Our work in progress paper addresses this gap in the literature and examines the research question: what is the difference (if any) in grade point average (GPA) between engineering students who enroll in different EEPs? The data source included GPA and enrollment records for 6156 undergraduate engineering students who enrolled in EEPs at a large research university located in the U.S. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to examine the difference in GPA between students who enrolled in engineering EEPs (N = 1204), business EEPs (N = 2923), and EEP seminar (N = 2029). The ANOVA results identify overall statistically significant differences in mean GPA between the three groups. Post hoc tests show that there are statistically significant differences in GPA between seminar and engineering, and seminar and business groups. No statistically significant differences were found between students enrolled in engineering EEPs and business EEPs. The implications of the results and directions for future work are discussed in the paper.