Investigating the relationship between tertiary education and entrepreneurship in Nigeria

The extant literature establishes entrepreneurship as a source of innovation and changefor productivity, economic growth, and competitiveness. Similarly, education is creditedas an indispensable and sustainable mechanism of individual and collective developmentbased on knowledge and skills channelling. Thus, educational training and developmentin all industries and nations have been crucial to entrepreneurship development,especially in tertiary education. Education and entrepreneurship intersect and coexist asagents of the economic development of any nation in a broader context. In the same vein,the Nigerian government has embedded entrepreneurship into its 2004 tertiaryeducation reform, but little research has examined the interplay between tertiaryeducation and entrepreneurship. Therefore, the researcher explored phenomena with amixed methods research approach, using secondary data gathered from the GlobalEntrepreneurship and Development Institute (GEDI) and collected primary data througha survey of graduate entrepreneurs in Nigeria. The findings include (1) a positiverelationship between the level of entrepreneurs and outturns of tertiary institutiongraduates in Nigeria, (2) evidence of a negative relationship between entrepreneurshipand types of Nigerian graduate jobs, (3) no evidence of a correlation betweenentrepreneurship and tertiary education, (4) established favourable influences of tertiaryeducation on entrepreneurial skills development in Nigeria, and (5) a positiverelationship between educated entrepreneurs and successful entrepreneurs in Nigeria.In that light, the study has helped to understand the interplay of tertiary education andentrepreneurship, which may provide a basis for strategic managers and policymakers inthe education sector to promote long-term sustainable business development andsocioeconomic growth.