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The Teaching and Practice of Entrepreneurship within Canadian Higher Education Institutions
10. Barriers to Entrepreneurship Education
Overall, the findings of the survey have shown Canadian institutions to be engaged in providing entrepreneurship education. The approach to entrepreneurship education, however, seems to be fragmentary across the six dimensions, as institutions perform well in certain dimensions and fall short in others. To identify possible reasons for this, institutions were asked to indicate three barriers to entrepreneurship education that they face.
Figure 9 lists the number and the percentage of institutions (universities and colleges) that identified each barrier as a challenge to providing entrepreneurship education.
[Description of Figure 9]
As shown in Figure 9, 42 of the 61 surveyed institutions identified the dependency of entrepreneurship education on the efforts of a single person / a few people as one of the three main barriers to entrepreneurship education. Such a barrier limits accessibility of entrepreneurship education across campus as most often the single person / few people responsible for entrepreneurship education are situated in one particular faculty. This corroborates findings in the strategy dimension indicating that in 44 percent of institutions a dean was the primary person responsible for entrepreneurship education, thereby concentrating entrepreneurship education within a particular faculty.
The second most common barrier was a lack of funding for entrepreneurship education, identified by 29 of the 61 surveyed institutions. The resource dimension of the survey showed that close to half of the surveyed institutions supported entrepreneurship education through short-term funding, thereby limiting the degree of commitment institutions place on developing a cohesive entrepreneurship education framework on campus.
The third most common barrier was a lack of strategic integration of entrepreneurship education across institutions. Two of the three most common barriers amongst institutions were strategic in nature, suggesting the need amongst management to acknowledge entrepreneurship education and commit to deliver it across campus.
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