FAMILY FINANCIAL STATUS AND STUDENTS’ ENTREPRENEURIAL INTENTION: THE MEDIATORY ROLE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION

The paper investigated whether entrepreneurship education mediates the relationship between students' family financial status income and their entrepreneurial intentions or not. Family financial status is defined in this study in terms of parent's annual income. Questionnaire was employed to collect data from a total sample of 320 final year under graduate students of higher education institutions in Northern Nigeria. The students were selected by using multi-stage stratified random sampling technique. Mediation analysis using PROCESS MACRO was employed and bootstrapping technique was used to test the hypothesis of the study. The result indicates that Family Financial Status (FFS) is indirectly related to students' Entrepreneurial Intentions (EI) through its relationship with Entrepreneurship Education (EE). First, the result showed that Family Financial Status had significant effect on Entrepreneurship Education, and the observed effect on Entrepreneurship Education was subsequently related to higher Entrepreneurial Intention. The bootstrap samples indicated that the indirect effect of Family Financial Status on students' Entrepreneurial Intentions through Entrepreneurship Education was completely above zero, which led us to conclude that Entrepreneurship Education mediates the relationship between Family Financial Status and Student' Entrepreneurial Intentions. The study recommends that entrepreneurship education should be encouraged as it proves to be a powerful stimulant for promoting entrepreneurship intention among students.