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This paper aims to determine whether Chinese university entrepreneurship education matches the needs of undergraduates and whether the entrepreneurial interests and expectations of students who have received university entrepreneurship education differ from those of students who have not. The authors hope that the research findings can provide practical implications and suggestions for improving university entrepreneurship education.

The authors chose one business university, two technology universities, and one medical university in Sichuan province and sent questionnaires to 350 randomly selected undergraduates. Based on data from 315 valid questionnaires, the authors conducted an empirical analysis.

The authors found that university entrepreneurship education does not fully satisfy students' needs. The authors also found no significant difference between the entrepreneurial interests and expectations of students who have received entrepreneurship education and those who have not.

The existing studies mainly focus on the supply side of university entrepreneurship education but ignored the demand side. The research is to understand the demand side – namely, students' needs for university entrepreneurship education. Are university students interested in new-business creation?. What are their needs for entrepreneurship education? Does Chinese university entrepreneurship education fit those needs? And finally, do the entrepreneurial interests and expectations of students who have received university entrepreneurship education differ from those of students who have not? Moreover, the study context consisted of one business university, two technology universities, and one medical university in a fast-developing region – Sichuan province. These universities are representative of the main categories of Chinese universities. Finally, the authors employ both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies to conduct the study.

The purpose of this study is to generate insight into the effects of entrepreneurship education in China by conducting a preliminary scoping study of the enterprising tendency of university students studying business.

This study used a self-administered questionnaire based on the General Measure of Enterprising Tendency v2 (GET2) test to measure the enterprising tendency of a group of Chinese university students. Decision trees, using the Chi-square automatic interaction detector (CHAID) approach, and multiple regression analyses were used to investigate the enterprising tendency of respondents.

The findings from this study indicate that the students have an overall medium level of enterprising tendency and strengths in some enterprising characteristics. The findings reveal that gender, family business, hometown and entrepreneurship education are significantly related to enterprising tendency but that age, household income, parents’ education and occupation are not.

Although the study is based on a relatively small sample taken from just one university in Beijing, the findings suggest that the enterprising tendency of students can be encouraged by entrepreneurship education. Combined with evidence that entrepreneurship education is at a relatively early stage of development in China, this finding suggests considerable scope to increase student’s enterprising tendency by extending, creating a more favourable environment for and improving the methods used to deliver entrepreneurship education. Enterprising tendency can be argued to naturally result in entrepreneurial intention; however, this extension is beyond the scope of this study, which is restricted to the analysis of enterprising tendency.

This study makes an original contribution to knowledge as it is one of the first studies to explore enterprising tendency among university students in China. It has value for government, policymakers and university program designers in that it provides direction for entrepreneurship education in China.