An Experience of Social Enterprise Education at the Undergraduate Level

Abstract

This paper deals with what and how to teach undergraduate students on social enterprise (SE) in order to infuse social entrepreneurship into them. We discuss our experience by sharing a course example and the real responses from students. To date, the effectiveness of a particular undergraduate SE course has not been unleashed from a real setting. And, until recently business professors have not had a grasp on what they would expect from their students in an SE class and what students would expect from their professors. Our goal is to provide insights on effective SE education at the undergraduate level. To this end, we have investigated existing syllabi, major SE topics, and SE textbooks, designed an introductory SE course as a course example, and conducted a survey to the course students after they had classes in it. According to our investigation, there is no guarantee that covering an SE textbook in its contents sequence would serve the transformative purposes of the course. Whatever teaching materials and methods are adopted, the educational emphasis should be placed on socio-ethical and sustainability aspects of SE. From a survey, it was found that a majority of students were aware of SE to some extent, while the information for their awareness originated more from mass media than from academic sources. Before taking an SE class, the students expect that the class would fulfill their simple curiosity or interests in SE rather than help to pursue their career in the field. To them, cases/stories are the most helpful methods to meet the expectations. The responses to our introductory SE course are as follows: Students’ satisfaction level was quite high. Almost all of them affirmed that they intended to take more SE classes. Moreover, their attitudes substantially changed in favor of SE.