American & Chinese Students’ Attitudes Towards Entrepreneurship

American & Chinese Students’ Attitudes towards Entrepreneurship

Xiang Wang

Northeastern University

Abstract

This research study investigates American and Chinese students’ attitudes towards entrepreneurship. It is clear that from previous studies that students who are from different countries and have different cultural backgrounds tend to have distinctive attitudes to entrepreneurship and their attitudes are influenced by some factors, such as school education and family backgrounds. The method of this study is cross-sectional survey. My results show that American and Chinese students’ attitudes about attributes of entrepreneurs are different. It also shows that American students think that entrepreneurship is helpful for people to find jobs and for the development of the society, while Chinese students tend to think that entrepreneurship can encourage people to study. Besides, American students are much clearer about their career directions compared with Chinese students and their attitudes to entrepreneurship are less affected by their friends than those of Chinese students. These results suggest that the differences between American and Chinese students’ attitudes towards entrepreneurship can provide useful suggestions to enable entrepreneurial education to adapt to local conditions, which can further improve the effectiveness of entrepreneurial education.

American & Chinese Students’ Attitudes towards Entrepreneurship

Problem to be Investigated

  This research study investigated whether American and Chinese Students have different attitudes to entrepreneurship and, if so, how did they differ. At the same time, the research study explored what factors impacted their attitudes towards entrepreneurship. In this research, entrepreneurship means the process of starting and managing an enterprise, and American and Chinese Students means undergraduate students who were born and raised in America or China.

  Acs who is an American economist and a professor at George Mason University argues that young people should have positive attitudes towards entrepreneurship so as to encourage them to engage in entrepreneurial activities, because these activities will stimulate economic growth(Acs, 2006). In order to make students adopt positive attitudes about entrepreneurship, it is significant to improve the effectiveness of entrepreneurial education. The effectiveness of entrepreneurial education means that students will have positive attitudes to entrepreneurship through entrepreneurial education they get.

  However, as entrepreneurship is increasingly becoming popular around the globe, its education should be customized according to different cultural contexts (Lee, S. M., & Lim, S. et al, 2006, p351). Thus, finding the differences in the attitudes toward entrepreneurship of students who are in different cultural contexts and figuring out what factors influence their attitudes about entrepreneurship will provide useful suggestions to enable entrepreneurial education to adapt to local conditions, which will further improve the effectiveness of entrepreneurial education.

  American and Chinese students are in totally distinctive cultural environments. For example, Chinese students take exam-oriented education, while American students have more chances to improve their practical abilities than Chinese students do, ect (Hu., &Tan, 2011). So they are serving as representative samples of the study.

Literature Review

 Students’ Attitudes towards Entrepreneurship in Different Countries

  Volkmann and Tokarski (2009) did a research study that focused on the attitudes about entrepreneurship of students who majored in economics and came from five European countries. The five European countries were Germany, Romania, Latvia, Italy and Austria. The researchers asked students from these five countries about their attitudes towards the qualities of entrepreneurs and towards themes of the future development of  entrepreneurship. Twenty qualities of entrepreneurs were chosen in research, such as ethical standards, energetic characteristics, etc.

  They found that Romanian students were more concerned with ethical standards of entrepreneurs, while students who came from the other four countries paid more attention to energetic characteristics of entrepreneurs. Besides, Latvian students thought that entrepreneurship would be unimportant in the future, but students from the other four countries felt that entrepreneurship would play a vital role in the future. The research showed that students’ attitudes to entrepreneurship from different countries not only had similarities, but also had differences. The differences provided many useful information for these countries to develop their own entrepreneurial education. So it is necessary and interesting to find whether students from different countries, such as China and the United States, have different attitudes to entrepreneurship or not.