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The impact of integrating entrepreneurship education in a real estate degree programme on entrepreneurship intent

Thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of M.Sc. (Building) in Property Development to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2017 / The lack of entrepreneurship is an obstacle to economic development. In South Africa (SA),
disciplines are taught in a context that is enterprise-based, with no emphasis on the need to impart
business start-up skills within specific disciplines. A culture of entrepreneurship is lacking, resulting
in low records of entrepreneurship incidents in SA.
The challenges and/or benefits of integrating entrepreneurship education within the South African real
estate (RE) course and its effects on graduates’ entrepreneurial intent, is not well understood. The
purpose of the research is to investigate whether the introduction of entrepreneurship education within
the RE discipline would encourage graduates to become entrepreneurial in the practice of real estates.
A mixed methodology approach has been used in this research. Primary and secondary research data
has been made available in the form of questionnaire surveys of graduates and course
directors/lecturers from the University of the Witwatersrand and other international universities that
have entrepreneurship education embedded within their real estate programmes, as will be selected by
the researcher.
The research has found that both pedagogical strategies of course work and applying experiential
learning teaching methods would be required to effectively integrate entrepreneurship education
within a real estate programme in a manner that would stimulate graduates to be entrepreneurial in the
practice of real estate, although it was not known whether the graduates would actually start
businesses and when they intended to do so. It was also found that those students whose studies took
place in real estate programmes that had entrepreneurship education embedded in them were more
commercially aware. The integration of entrepreneurship education also resulted in an improvement
of graduate self-esteem and confidence. Graduates were endowed with adequate professional,
interpersonal, technical and business skills. The research, however, found the majority of real estate
courses lacked in teaching graduates to be more versatile. The courses largely lacked in the provision
of industry exposure and were inadequate in teaching graduates how to market themselves and their
real estate businesses. According to the findings on the individual entrepreneurship test, graduates that
studied entrepreneurship-based real estate courses had a higher probability of starting a business. / MT2018

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/24202
Date January 2017
CreatorsMasia, Karabo
Source SetsSouth African National ETD Portal
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
FormatOnline resource (81 leaves), application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf

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