ENTREPRENEURSHIP DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIAN UNIVERSITIES: A CASE STUDY OF RIVERS STATE

The Nigeria University Commission (NUC) introduced the Entrepreneurship education into the curriculum of tertiary educational institutions to equip students and to make them self-relevance on graduation. As a means of controlling and reducing unemployment rate, self-employment was envisaged through the entrepreneurship education. It is on this realization that this study examined the entrepreneurship programmers in higher educational institutions in Nigeria and the extent of its implementation in Rivers State. To achieve this, survey design was adopted for the study. The population of the study was 3554 lecturers in the nine higher institutions in the State. A multistage simple random sampling technique was used to sample 367 lecturers from the population. A self-constructed structured questionnaire of the Likert 4point rating scale of Very High Extent, High Extent, Low Extent and Very Low Extent, with ordinals values of 4, 3, 2 and 1 respectively. The instrument was validated by three experts and a correlation coefficient of 0.81 was obtained to confer a higher reliability using Cornbrash Alpha. The researchers administered and retrieved, after filling the questionnaire copies by the help of paid research assistant s from the six sampled institutions. The data gathered were analyzed using mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions. The hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance, using Analysis Variance (ANOVA). It was found that majority of the entrepreneurship programmers were not available because of inadequate funding for the implementation of the programmed in higher institutions in Rivers State. However, the basic facilities/resources were found to be available for study. The study recommended that lecturers of the programmer should be more involved in practice than in theoretical work. School Management should formulate polices that will placed more emphasis on practical. The staff should be adequately trained and regularly retrained to meet the new demand for the programmers.