79 ENTREPRENEURIAL FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO A BUSINESS START-UP AMONG MALAYSIAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE STUDENTS YENG KEAT OOI 1 , CHEE HEE HOE 2 , SHUHYMEE AHMAD 3 , NORASHIDAH HASHIM 4 School of Business Management Universiti Utara Malaysia 1 Email: ykooi@uum.edu.my 2 Email: chhoe@uum.edu.my 3 Email: shuhymee@uum.edu.my 4 Email: norashidah@uum.edu.my ABSTRACT This study investigates the effect of entrepreneurship education on Malaysian community college students’ inclination towards entrepreneurship. The objective of this study is to examine the effect of entrepreneurship education on the Malaysian community college students’ inclination towards entrepreneurship. The sample consisted of 250 students from four community colleges who were the final year students of their diploma studies in various disciplines. A survey questionnaire was employed to elicit response concerning their entrepreneurship inclination and characteristics. The data was analysed using descriptive (for respondents’ characteristics) and regression (for the entrepreneurial factors) statistics. The results of the study showed that 50.8 per cent of the community college students would consider starting a business as their future career whilst 32.8 per cent stated that they are likely to start a business after graduation. This is mainly due to the effort taken by the community colleges in promoting entrepreneurship among students. In terms of entrepreneurial factors, role models and the role played by community colleges in promoting entrepreneurship appear to have statistically significant influence in community college students’ decision to pursue an entrepreneurial career. Hence, this study showed that community colleges and role models play a vital role in fostering and promoting entrepreneurship in order to produce more entrepreneurial-inclined graduates. Recommendations and future research are made based on the findings of the study. Keywords: community colleges; inclination towards entrepreneurship; role models; regression. 1. INTRODUCTION Entrepreneurship has become an everyday buzzword. Policymakers, economists, academics and even university students are talking about it. Hence, the subject of entrepreneurship has been attracting growing interest in academia across the globe (Levie, 1999; Volery & Mueller, 2006). The increasing number of offerings in entrepreneurship at institutions of higher learning is generally due to two main reasons: the ability of entrepreneurs to create job opportunities and the need from individuals to obtain business knowledge and skills through education. For these reasons, the increase popularity of entrepreneurship education in institutions of higher learning is aptly attributed to the higher demand from students who are searching for educational programmes that will provide them with the appropriate business skills, knowledge and experience required in order to survive in today’s robust business milieu (Brown, 1999) and alsoto exploit and develop an opportunity into viable businesses (Volery & Mueller, 2006). brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by UUM Repository