Modeling the impact of social factors on students’ entrepreneurial intentions at a classical university

This study investigates how external social factors influence entrepreneurial intentions among university students, and whether these effects vary by academic discipline – a topic that has not been explored before. To this end, we analyse survey data from 1,917 students from all faculties at Lomonosov Moscow State University who completed entrepreneurship courses between 2020 and 2024. Using ordinal logit regression, we estimate the influence of the following factors on entrepreneurial intentions: the presence of entrepreneurs in the family, the presence of entrepreneurial friends, perceived peer appraisal of an entrepreneurial career, and the year and field of study. Our findings show that all four factors significantly increase entrepreneurial intentions in the pooled sample (p < 0.01). However, the effects vary markedly by field: having entrepreneurial friends is insignificant for Law and Business students, but highly significant for Social sciences/Humanities students. The year of study has a positive effect on the intentions of Management and Mathematics students, but a negative effect on those of Economics students, suggesting that the economics curriculum may steer students towards corporate employment. The perceived attractiveness of a career is not significant for STEM students, reflecting a stronger orientation towards academic research and development (R&D). This study is the first to empirically demonstrate that social factors operate differently across disciplines. Based on these differences, we propose discipline-specific recommendations for encouraging student entrepreneurship.