Critical Assessment of Entrepreneurship Education Programme Implementation in Public Universities in Cross River State during Post Covid-19 Pandemic Era

Abstract

The study assessed the extent of entrepreneurship education programme implementation in public Universities in Cross River State during the post Covid-19 pandemic era. Two research questions and one null hypothesis guided the study. Descriptive survey design was employed for the study with a population of 12,095 undergraduates (300 level) of 2021/2022 academic session from Universities in Cross River State. Stratified random sampling technique was adopted to sample 347 respondents. A validated questionnaire was used for data collection. Cronbach Alpha Analysis was used to establish the reliability at 0.81. Frequency counts and simple percentages were used to answer the research questions while independent t-test was used to test the hypotheses at .05 level of significance. Findings generally point to the fact that a significant number of the student population are not satisfied with the poor implementation of the entrepreneurial course content during the post pandemic era. It was also found that students’ negative attitude towards Entrepreneurship education is a function of poor implementation of the programme in the sampled institutions. Results equally indicted that there is a significant difference in the mean rating of students in State University and Federal University on the implementation of entrepreneurship education in Cross River State during post-Covid-19 pandemic era with Federal University scoring higher mean than State University. It was however concluded that most students may not wish, by all indications, to nurture intentions to get into self-employment upon graduation from the University due to poor implementation of the entrepreneurial programme. It is therefore recommended among others that a monitoring team should be set up by the National Universities Commission (NUC) to regularly appraise and report the progress and shortcoming of Entrepreneurship Education in Nigerian Universities.