Entrepreneurship Education and Lower Socioeconomic Black Youth: An Empirical Investigation

This study tested the effects of an entrepreneurship education intervention, the New Youth Entrepreneur curriculum, on lower socioeconomic black high-school students' knowledge of basic and advanced concepts in entrepreneurship. Ninety-five high school sophomores (over 85% black) from a lower socioeconomic neighborhood made up the sample for the experimental design: 51 in the treatment group and 44 in the control group. The two instruments used measured participants' knowledge of basic entrepreneurship concepts and higher cognitive levels of entrepreneurship learning, including comprehension, application, and analysis. The treatment group experienced the New Youth Entrepreneur (NYE) curriculum for one period a day for a semester, while the control group was exposed to basic entrepreneurship concepts at an awareness level as part of a general business education course. It was predicted and found that the treatment group significantly outperformed the control group on all dimensions of entrepreneurship tested. The study results confirm that appropriate curricular innovation can significantly influence the acquisition of entrepreneurship concepts and skills by lower socioeconomic black students. They also confirm that these same students can even be energized to the point of moving from opportunity recognition to initial business implementation.