University Students' Perceptions of the Social Entrepreneurship Learning Environment

There is an avowed political commitment in most of the European countries to promote an entrepreneurial spirit through learning and training. It is accepted the potential of education systems to provide training in some of the skills required for entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship. In Spain, in the recent education reform this objective is, with lots of critiques, strongly promoted. The 2013 Education Act state is to strength entrepreneurship for the performance of activities and business initiatives (LOMCE 2013). However, entrepreneurship is something more than just salaried employment; it is also related with social impact. Therefore, teaching entrepreneurship and teaching social entrepreneurship have some common elements but they involve different perspectives which sometimes are overlapping (DeTienne and Chandler 2004). We highlight the need to identify and make explicit the strategies specifically related to teaching social entrepreneurship. In the context of higher education, we can find numerous examples of universities that have implemented entrepreneurship extracurricular initiatives such as university-business foundations, business chairs, and programs to promote the creation of spin-offs. However, efforts in university programs to promote knowledge, skills, and abilities related to social entrepreneurship are insufficient (Palomares-Montero and Verdeguer-Aracil 2013). We would like to examine how the social entrepreneurship notion is being training and to identify knowledge, skills and abilities related to social entrepreneurship being promoted in Spanish universities. Thus, we apply a survey to students in the last course of their degrees, in the field of social and legal studies, at public universities in the Valencia region. We will know the student’s perceptions of methods used in the classroom in an effort to identify perceptions of teaching and practice of social entrepreneurship.