Keywords

1 Introduction and Background

South Africa is known for its high youth unemployment rate. The university, which serves as the site for the case study reported in this chapter, is located in a coastal city within the Eastern Cape region of South Africa. The Eastern Cape, for the period from April to June 2021, recorded the highest official unemployment rate across the country at 47.1% (Statistics South Africa, 2021). These alarming statistics relate directly to the employability prospects for young people, more especially students. This particular city is known for its manufacturing and automotive industry which has, in recent years, been impacted by economic constraints further preventing engineering students from accessing appropriate training and employment prospects. On the other end, higher education through the National Development Plan links education prospects to the labour market and industry as a whole.

Entrepreneurship education and resilience, at first glance, appear to be two unrelated concepts. However, we know that globally young people encounter adverse circumstances around their livelihoods and employability prospects. Furthermore, we remain cognisant that the effects of unemployment amongst young people in South Africa are compounded by poverty and a lack of access to education. These socio-economic aspects serve as risk factors that challenge the ability of young people to display resilience. The complexity of the relationship between economic and social exclusion on the resilience of young people has underscored the need for solutions that promote greater inclusion of socially vulnerable and excluded youth in higher education.

Within engineering education, recent years (from 2017 to 2018) have seen a change in the qualifications offered at traditional and comprehensive South African universities. The engineering curriculum has shifted from a National Diploma to the Bachelor of Engineering Technology degree. One significant difference is that the new qualification (Bachelor of Engineering Technology) does not include the year of experiential learning (often referred to as in-service training) which was a mandatory component of the National Diploma final-year. In other words, previous final-year students had access to practical experience which is currently overshadowed by the theoretical features of the new qualification. An implication thereof is that engineering graduates no longer enter industry having had prior experience of working in industry. This in turn has possible consequences for graduate employability and how sought after these graduates are when applying for entry-level positions in industry. Collectively, these experiences compound existing vulnerabilities for engineering students.

In the broader study on which the current chapter is based, lecturers have suggested that students have little training to facilitate a smoother transition into industry and the labour market. The reality is that engineering students are expected to enter industry having had prior practical experience; however, this is not happening as the practical component has been reduced to a capstone project. Thus, this chapter aims to provide a new interdisciplinary understanding of how entrepreneurship education may contribute towards the academic resilience of students, specifically engineering students. This chapter is presented as a resilience study and its contribution is made at the intersection of three gaps in the current body of knowledge. The first being the paucity of studies on academic resilience in higher education institutions. Secondly, there is a need to improve understandings of support mechanisms available to students who face adverse circumstances. This second identified gap is based on policy discourses in South Africa such as the National Development Plan (NDP, 2030; National Planning Commission, 2011) which recognises the importance of interventions aimed at supporting young people by adopting a “youth lens” to expand opportunities and reduce marginalisation. Along similar lines, the National Youth Policy (NYP, 2015–2020; National Youth Development Agency, 2015) places an equivalent emphasis on outcomes such as educational attainment, employment and health which are critical to the overall well-being of young people. Thirdly, and in line with the need to improve support mechanisms available for engineering students, there is a lack of literature that engages engineering students to draw on their own perspectives and lived realities.

There are few instances when resilience has been used within the broader field of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education. Within entrepreneurship, it has often been used to measure resilience quantitatively with the use of scales and hypothesis testing (see, for instance, Fatoki, 2018; Zhao & Wibowo, 2021). Similarly within entrepreneurship education, the published work is characterised by quantitative measures and experimental designs (consider, for example Prihadi et al., 2018; González-López et al., 2019). Thus, emphasising the importance of this discussion of qualitative findings in this area of inquiry.

The argument for this chapter rests on both a knowledge and a social gap. The knowledge gap lies in that the available evidence on resources that support the transitions of young people points to a limited understanding of academic resilience as a process embedded in dynamic socio-cultural and socio-ecological contexts. The social gap is strongly linked to the overall aim of this publication on transforming entrepreneurship education. Entrepreneurship education can enhance resilience as well as the employability prospects of engineering students. As such, this chapter brings together the theoretical constructs of resilience and entrepreneurship education and provides insight into how resilience, specifically academic resilience, can be facilitated through entrepreneurship education.

This chapter begins with a brief overview of entrepreneurship education and resilience, in terms of their history and major key points. Although a number of studies have examined academic resilience, there has not been a strong focus on examining it in the context of a supportive intervention such as entrepreneurship education. The novelty of this chapter lies in its application of the youth development approach to education entrepreneurship, as a means to strengthen the academic resilience of engineering students. The next section of the chapter provides a description of the methodology used to draw perspectives from the participants. Finally, the last two sections of the chapter present the findings of the study and discuss several implications that these might have for how entrepreneurship education can be utilised through a youth development lens to enhance resilience amongst engineering students.

2 Entrepreneurship Education and Resilience in Higher Education

Entrepreneurship education and resilience are independently two comprehensive fields of inquiry, which have been brought together in the context of higher education for the current chapter. A brief overview to clarify and contextualise the use of these terms in the chapter follows.

There are varying definitions of entrepreneurship education or enterprise education as it is commonly referred to (Lackéus, 2015). These definitions exist across the different levels of education, from as early as primary through to higher education. In the context of this chapter, entrepreneurship education refers to learning through participating in entrepreneurship with a focus on personal development (Lackéus, 2015). The fundamental aim of entrepreneurship education is to focus on the needs of individuals and what they envision as economically valuable (Duval-Couetil, 2013). Moreover, the understanding which guides this chapter is consistent with that of other authors such as Shane and Venkataraman (2007). These authors stated that entrepreneurship can occur within an existing organisation such as the university in the current case study and does not solely involve the creation of an enterprise. In his review article, Gedeon (2017) summarises the critiques of entrepreneurship education and states that authors in the field have been criticised for not being theoretically robust and for the absence of best practices and a shared framework.

Resilience is a popular and well-researched construct within the field of positive psychology. Allan and McKenna (2019) indicate that resilience is the capacity or the ability to absorb disturbance and to retain the same structure, function, and feedback. Gayles (2005) refers to resilience as being an individual’s ability to successfully adapt to life tasks in the face of social disadvantage or highly adverse conditions. Resilience has also been defined as the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties and an individual’s ability to bounce back from a negative experience with competent functioning (İkizer, 2014). Kuldas et al. (2015) assert that resilience can be learned and developed and is a process of individuation through a structured system with gradual discovery of personal and unique abilities. Longitudinal studies show that resilient individuals have gradually developed effective coping techniques that allow them to easily navigate around or through a crisis (Alcuetas, 2019). Individuals who demonstrate resilience are people with optimistic attitudes, positive emotionality, and in practice are able to balance negative emotions with positive ones (Theron & Theron, 2010). Moore and Westley (2011) explained that resilience research focuses on studying those that engage with life with hope and humour despite devastating losses and trials. Resilience is not only said to be about overcoming deeply stressful situations, but also about cultivating competent functioning and becoming more resourceful through these situations (Brown, 2015).

Whilst resilience has been researched in the context of primary school children and adolescent youth (see, for example Cortina et al., 2016; Dass-Brailsford, 2005; Theron, 2012; Van Rensburg et al., 2018), in youth transition (Van Breda, 2017; Van Breda & Dickens, 2017), and in community and family settings (see, for example Ahmed et al., 2004; Liebenberg et al., 2016; Mosavel et al., 2015), there has not been a strong focus on academic resilience at university level and in higher education contexts. For the purposes of this chapter, resilience is defined as the capacity to do well, despite risk and/or adverse conditions (Theron & Theron, 2013). Risk refers to the potential of harm, displacement or loss which may occur as a result of perceived threats within an area of daily functioning (Robinson et al., 2001). Academic resilience can be defined as the attainment of academic achievement despite adversity (Morales, 2008). Risk is often used synonymously with adversity, which has been defined as an unpleasantly bearable difficulty (Castejón & Zancajo, 2015). One of the critiques of resilience theory is that it ascribes value to individuals overcoming adversity as opposed to minimising or eradicating adversity (Van Breda, 2018). Adversity for the youth often takes the form of socio-economic challenges and related financial difficulties (Van Breda & Theron, 2018).

More commonly, theories used by South African universities to conceptualise students within higher education previously include (a) Erikson’s theory, (b) Marcia’s Ego Identity Statuses, (c) Chickering’s Theory of Identity Development and (d) Schlossberg’s Transition Theory (University of the Free State, 2018). Marcia’s Ego Identity Statuses examine whether concepts of commitment and exploration are present or absent. This theory specifically denotes four identity statuses; specifically identity achievement, identity moratorium, identity foreclosure, and identity diffusion. Chickering’s Theory of Identity Development is viewed more as a circular process with the understanding that the student moves through various stages: developing competence, managing emotions, moving through autonomy towards interdependence, developing mature interpersonal relationships, establishing identity, developing purpose and developing integrity. Schlossberg’s Transition theory, on the other hand, takes the view that the student transitions from the situation to the self, to finding support and strategies.

For the purposes of the research reported in this chapter, the term “youth” refers to young people that are of the age to attend university. By broad definition, youth has been defined by Statistics South Africa (2018) as those aged between 15 and 34 years. Youth resilience should be treated as urgent and cultivated. This is supported by evidence that structural disadvantages, hardships, degraded and degrading communities are at the frontline of resilience studies and are what set out to jeopardise wellness (Van Breda & Theron, 2018). Padesky and Mooney (2012) claim that the youth have cultivated adaptive psychological mechanisms of agency and mastery that assist them in self-regulating, problem-solving, meaning-making, and the capacity to either modify how they feel or their circumstances around them in order to keep persisting. Two issues highlight the importance of exploring the two seemingly unrelated constructs of entrepreneurship education and resilience in the higher education context. Firstly, in the South African context, the aftermath of the #FeesMustFall impasse was an added obstacle for students to cope with, and secondly the more contemporary challenge being posed to South African and international higher education is the COVID-19 pandemic. Working in the South African Labour and Development Research Unit, Mudiriza and De Lannoy (2020) found a significant prevalence of depressive symptoms and low levels of emotional lockdown amongst youth during the COVID-19 pandemic.

3 Theoretical Perspectives on Positive Youth Development

Positive youth development emerged as a response to dominant outlooks that problematised young people and their realities. In the 1980s and early 1990s, policy makers began to rethink approaches to youth development “to help young people learn and develop across a full range of developmental areas, taking into account cognitive, social, moral, civic, vocational, cultural and physical well-being” (Pittman et al., 2003, p. 6). This chapter sought to understand the voices of young students and in doing so, share their experiences of academic resilience with the support of an entrepreneurship programme. The chapter draws on a positive youth development to make the argument that entrepreneurship education could be instrumental in expanding the academic resilience of engineering students. Positive youth development is also referred to as youth development, although this chapter will make use of the term positive youth development going forward. The youth development approach and its emphasis on youth engagement opportunities were especially useful in the analysis of this study as it allowed the author to unpack how personal character strengths (personal resources) and protective factors (social resources) could reduce existing vulnerabilities of engineering students whilst promoting academic resilience.

To this end, the youth development theory situates the individual lives of young people as those that are shaped by varying socio-cultural contexts. This standpoint is generative for grasping how entrepreneurship can indeed be instrumental in a field that, at first glance, focuses on the perceived weakness of engineering students. It is also here that this perspective and its attention to building capabilities and hope is of value for informing entrepreneurship education for engineering students.

Applying a youth development lens to academic resilience means that we need to grapple with the intricate connections between the developmental experiences of young people and the realities that challenge them. In opposition to developmental psychology which uses a deficit approach to supporting young people, Patel (2009) asserts that the term “youth development” has emerged as a counterbalance to the treatment approach. The view held by the latter authors was influenced by the work of Hamilton and Hamilton (2003) who enunciated that youth development can be understood in three broad categories. Firstly, they explain youth development as a process whereby young people grow and interact within their own environments. During this time, young people are developing key life skills to impact on their ability to lead healthy lives in areas such as work, education, and overall society. Secondly, youth development is guided by principles that encourage social inclusion by building on their existing strengths, whilst paying attention to existing patterns that shape the socio-economic and psychosocial needs of young people. Finally, youth development is also used to give a youth-centred language to programmes, policies and interventions that are designed for young people.

To summarise, this chapter takes a youth development approach that places the needs and voices of young people at the centre. Such an approach attempts to engage engineering students about their realities as they transition into higher education. It is important to note that a youth development lens allows us to recognise the strengths of engineering students and how these can be used to facilitate academic resilience using entrepreneurship education. As such, the youth development approach presented itself as a suitable theoretical perspective to support this study in light of the methodological choices which are discussed next.

4 Exploring the Case Study Data

The data derived from a broader case study which involved engineering students, engineering lecturers and student support staff at a comprehensive South African university. This chapter focuses on only one subset of data, namely the individual interviews conducted with the engineering students.

5 Research Paradigm

Through an interpretivist paradigm, this qualitative case study seeks to investigate the perceptions of engineering students’ academic resilience in the context of higher education. Hesse-Biber (2017) proposes that “researchers working from interpretive traditions value experiences and perspectives as important sources of knowledge” (p. 23). By drawing on the voices of engineering students “meaning-making” responses will be generated as opposed to the existing methodological limitations under which academic resilience has been previously understood as mentioned earlier. The research question that guided the study is “How can entrepreneurship education facilitate the academic resilience of engineering students?”

6 Why a Case Study Research Design?

Case studies have further been recognised as commonly utilised by researchers in the interpretivist paradigm (Assalahi, 2015; Bertram & Christiansen, 2014). For the purpose of this study, the benefit of an exploratory case study research design (Yin, 2018), is that it allows for rich data gathering possibilities from those within a case.

7 Setting and Sampling

The perceptions shared by the participants are within a particular setting, namely South African higher education. Within this setting, the “case” or unit of analysis is the final-year engineering students in the BEngTech degree programme at one comprehensive university. To be included in the sample group, students had to be at least 18 years old and registered for a BEngTech degree in one of the following disciplines: Civil, Electrical, Industrial, Marine, or Mechanical engineering. Students at the selected university were recruited as a sample group based on institutional data demonstrating increased retention despite engineering students having had the highest dropout rate at universities in general, with half of them not completing their studies (Sunday Times, 2018). This is a resilience study and therefore two factors needed to be present to qualify as a resilience study. The 2020 cohort of final-year engineering students present multifaceted challenges as they transition through their university experience. The first factor being evidence of risk and/or adversity, and the second factor being an established positive outcome despite risk (Sanders et al., 2013; Ungar, 2015). Thus, the study made use of a purposeful sample of 10 final-year BEngTech students from this cohort.

8 Participant Profile

Six of the participants identified as Black African, two identified as Coloured (an official term used in South Africa for population classification, denoting a person of mixed race), one identified as White, and one identified as Indian. The age of the participants ranged from 22 to 28 years, and the mean age was 25.6 years. All of the participants self-identified as cisgender: seven of the participants self-identified as being male whilst the remaining three self-identified as being female. Participants were given the opportunity to volunteer other gender identifications. The sample consisted of four Civil engineering students, four Electrical engineering students and two Industrial engineering students. With regard to nationality, four students were international students whilst the other six were South African.

9 Data Generation Strategy

An interview protocol used by Morales (2008) in a study focusing on academic resilience informed the semi-structured interview schedule which was used as an instrument to generate data for this chapter. Individual semi-structured interviews were used to gather relatable core experiences from key informants (DeJonckheere & Vaughn, 2019). Participants were invited to provide an account of their experience of academic resilience by asking them, first, how they transitioned to university; then, how they understood the socio-ecological context in which their academic resilience occurred; and, finally, which factors contributed to their academic resilience. What is meant by “resilience” is the context of this study (the capacity to do well, despite adverse conditions; Theron & Theron, 2013) was explained to each participant beforehand so that a common understanding amongst the subjects of study would be reached.

10 Procedure

Participants were recruited electronically via email. They received a participant information sheet and an opportunity to ask questions regarding the study was given before interviews commenced. No incentives were offered to any participants to encourage participation. The semi-structured interviews lasted between 20 and 90 min, depending on how much information each participant was willing to share. Interviews were conducted online via Zoom. All interviews were audio-recorded on Zoom, transcribed by a third-party transcription service and stored electronically on a password protected computer. The Zoom platform was used because the COVID-19 pandemic, national lockdown and social distancing requirements made in-person interviews impossible at the time this study was conducted and this necessitated electronic and remote interaction with interview participants. Limitations include remote interviewing via Zoom due to COVID-19 and the inclusion of data collected at one university only.

11 Data Analysis

The qualitative data generated from the semi-structured interviews was analysed thematically (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2020). Thematic analysis allows the researcher to engage with the transcripts from the interviews in a reflexive and reflective manner (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Shaw, 2010). Furthermore, thematic analysis enables the inductive generation of codes and themes (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The use of an inductive approach enabled the researcher to draw out themes and patterns to categorise the data during the research process.

12 Ethical Considerations

Prior to the commencement of this case study, ethical clearance was granted at both faculty and institutional level. In addition, all relevant gatekeepers were consulted and subsequently granted access. Participants provided their written consent electronically prior to data generation and were informed that they could be referred for psychotherapy if the interview resulted in them experiencing any signs of emotional distress. In addition, confidentiality of participants was maintained, and no individual names of the participants were used as these were substituted by pseudonyms in order to protect their identities.

13 Researcher Positionality

The author, who identified himself as a doctoral candidate who was not part of the university staff, approached the participants via email. In addition, the author is registered as a clinical psychologist with the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA). The researcher is aware of their positionality in the study and how this impacts the existing power dynamic between them and the participants. Levels of trust inform existing power dynamics and impact the positionality of both the researcher and the participant. As such, Heath et al. (2009) suggest that building trust is critical when conducting research with young people as was reflected in the theoretical perspective chosen for this study. As such, participants were continuously reminded that they could withdraw consent at any point in time during the interview process.

14 Findings and Discussion

The premise of this chapter is that in order to better understand the academic resilience of young people, it is important to apply a youth development approach to academic resilience first. The argument provided in the introduction is that increased understanding of what is economically and socially valuable to engineering students could provide guidelines as to how entrepreneurship education can contribute to academic resilience of these students.

The section is organised according to three core acknowledgements, namely: that these participants possess inherent assets, character strengths and resilience; that young people should be assisted when asked for help and have the necessary resources made available to them; and that social inclusion is key to a sense of belonging and subsequent retention in higher education. The three main foci mentioned above translate directly to the following three themes, namely (i) personal character strengths; (ii) access to guidance, resources and information and (iii) a sense of belonging and social connection.

14.1 Theme One: Personal Character Strengths

The participants highlighted their personal character strengths. Anele, a female South African Electrical engineering student, speaks about being hard working and valuing how organised she is: ”Yeah, I'm hard working. Honestly, I don't give up. Like many people would say I’m like OCD, but I feel like I organized my plan”. Similarly, Gavin, a male Civil engineering student from Zimbabwe, describes how his work ethic and being hard working enabled him to surpass expectations by passing even when he was expected to fail: “I work very, very hard to actually manage to pass because…I was supposed to fail. But I managed to get some distinctions, and especially in… in computers”. For us to fully appreciate Gavin’s sentiments in the above quote, we may need to understand how his educational background and limited exposure to technology in high school negatively affected his transition to university: “There's a lot that we have to cope with, like for instance, starting from understanding, how a computer works, how [to] operate [a]computer…”.

The trait of self-determination is one that relates to that of hard work. As Beauty, a female Electrical engineering student from Zimbabwe, said: “I am so determined to a point that if I tell myself that I would go for this, no matter how difficult it is, I will go for it”. Jason, a South African Electrical engineering student, expressed his self-determination by saying: “I'm not one to easily give up”. Self-determination often requires an individual to be and remain focused. This can be seen in what, Randy, a male South African Civil engineering student said: “I have a little page here from when I started. Focus and patience. Those two words I have written here on my wall”. Beyond this Randy reflected on his growth and personal strengths by echoing:

I've really grown as an individual, no longer so shy. I don't really care what people think anymore. So I've grown in that aspect, so it will be easy for me now. And given my previous work experience and all that to enter into the work environment, because I feel comfortable.

Interestingly, André, another South African male, Industrial engineering student, shared similar sentiments regarding his growth from his prior work experience: “so that was one thing that boosted my confidence. It was it was really a challenge working there as the shy guy as a receptionist”. André further expressed how he dealt with this challenge when he stated that: “I think the most important thing is the motivation because there has to be something you can fall back on if times get challenging because you definitely gonna get tested”.

However, for Naledi, a South African female Electrical engineering student, it was more a relational character strength. She described how being forthcoming and taking the first step to engage with others seems to have stood her in good stead: “Being outspoken, I think that is the major one which helped a lot…I would speak, ask, talk, try and make friends everywhere I go. Greet someone, smile with them. Trying to be friendly and create that friendship. Greet lectures, like, after [a lecture] say hi, bye to them”.

These accounts of personal strengths correspond to the concepts introduced by the youth development approach. As seen above, the participants demonstrated the value of different personal characteristics which comprised and enabled their academic resilience throughout their engineering studies. It is important that resilience research be contextualised, in this instance for the participants within the context of their engineering studies. Resilience research that is produced without critical analyses has a high chance of being decontextualised and not in direct engagement with the contextual and cultural influences required to put the system in a state of equilibrium in order to then further enhance its personal capacity to cultivate favourable outputs (Theron et al., 2012).

Moreover, individual or personal character strengths are part of Tinto’s student integration model (SMI) (see, for example McGhie, 2017). Tinto’s theoretical model also emphasised the role of past educational experiences, as is evidenced through Gavin’s experience with computers. Tinto posited that negative educational experiences could negatively influence social or academic integration. The importance of student integration is expanded on more in the discussion of the third theme, a sense of belonging and social connection, which follows a bit later.

From this theme, we can see that participants resonated with the idea of inherent assets from the Positive Youth Development Approach through their perceptions of their personal character strengths (personal resources). Another key element drawn from the Positive Youth Development approach is that of protective factors (social resources). The participants’ social resources are unpacked in the subsequent theme two.

14.2 Theme Two: Access to Guidance, Resources, and Information

For each of the participants, there were protective factors and social resources which could buffer them from some of the challenges they described.

Anele experienced the relationship with her lecturers as a protective factor: “lecturers give you, like, personal contacts, email. Talk to me whenever we have a problem with this, just communication”. Gavin expressed similar sentiments but for him it was his relationship with one lecturer that helped him: “Mrs [X], the lecturer. Yeah, she’s just been a mother to me”. Taj, an international male Civil engineering student, expressed his overall sense of support from his particular engineering department in the following quote: “you could go there with a problem and someone was there to fix it, help you out … there was a more humane factor to it”. From the perceptions of these participants, it appears that a person- and student-centred department is protective.

Katlego, a male South African Industrial engineering student, on the other hand, speaks about formalised peer-related support and the importance of connecting with a senior student as a resource: “the only thing from the University that was a starting point was the how to, the how to buddy programme”. The buddy programme Katlego is alluding to here is the university’s first year orientation programme which is an informational and relational resource for all first year university students. Following the intensive orientation period at the beginning of the year, the orientation leader is tasked to further guide the first year through the first semester. Beauty describes a more informal peer support and says that: “having a friend from South Africa that helped you with the English enough to transition with the language … built confidence”.

In the same breath Beauty stated: “…and also through tutoring and having to tutor in English, that also made you more confident”. As final year students, the participants were eligible to apply for student assistant positions as mentors, tutors, orientation leaders and marking assistants. At times these positions are advertised and other times through an entrepreneurial spirit, students actively approached academic and student support staff to create such roles for themselves. Two instances of this entrepreneurial spirit can be seen in Beauty and Gavin. Beauty communicated the motivation behind her entrepreneurial drive by saying: “I was waiting to raise my money for accommodation. I never had a chance to hold a book to study. So at some point lecturers they don't understand that we come from different backgrounds”. Gavin similarly shared how he had to work as a student as a means to sustain himself so that he could retain focus on his studies: “Now I had to find the money to put food on my table to actually be able to concentrate at the same time”. He further explained how he did this: “I would help the lecturer with marking so if you can imagine marking more than 120 scripts and then you have an assignment that is due. You have a test that is due”. Another participant who tutored and that could relate to Beauty and Gavin was Tafadzwa, a male international Civil engineering student, who conveyed the following sentiments: “You know the money wasn't coming in as they wanted. So yeah, I fixed the problem”. The experience of these three international students have shown us how economic exclusion can threaten the attainment of fundamental human needs such as food and shelter.

On the other hand, for Taj, an international student included in this study, acknowledged his position of privilege: “Financial stress I haven't had that issue.” He went on to emphasise that, “social, financial, mental health, everything like that. I am fortunate enough to come from”.

The protective factors highlighted by the participants illuminate the relational component of student success in that the protective resilience enablers reported by students seem to be closely associated with their relationships with academic staff and friends. What emerges from these findings is that how students perceive themselves and the support mechanisms available to support them is not fully reflected in the literature on academic resilience and education entrepreneurship. This finding emphasises the need for South African higher education to take a more assets-based approach to learning and teaching and student support as opposed to the traditional deficit view. The perceptions further suggest the academic resilience of engineering students in South Africa could be supported by introducing entrepreneurship education as a package of support that focuses on the whole individual as a student.

14.3 Theme Three: Sense of Belonging and Social Connection

When looking at the ages of the participants, we see that all of them fall within the period of young adulthood. For Erikson each developmental stage was characterised by a particular psychological crisis, for individuals aged 18–40 years, the psychological crisis was termed intimacy versus isolation. The focus here is on establishing meaningful relationships. Of all of these theories described earlier in this chapter, Erikson’s theory speaks more directly to the theory of Positive Youth Development. Some of the participants mentioned their significant others and the protective function those relationships played in buffering them against adverse events. For Naledi, it was a sense of connection amongst female engineering students provided by a specific extracurricular programme and short learning programme (WELA) that made a difference: “we're introduced to as female engineers in particular [to] WELA”. WELA is the Women in Engineering Leadership Association which aims to empower and develop young female engineering students in what is regarded as a male-dominated profession. For Gavin, his relationship with an academic staff member is what stood out for him, he captured the essence of the relationship by saying, “Yeah, she's just been a mother to me”. André had the following to say about how he felt inspired by his partner, “She's this huge motivation for me. So that's also what I've used to feed that fire in me”. Whereas Taj, described how the relationship with his friends had grown and the meaning that held for him, “I was lucky to find a group of friends who are basically family at this point”.

Conversely, others spoke about the feelings of loneliness associated with moving to a new country or province and feeling excluded, both socially and economically. Katlego spoke about having to rely on himself and remaining intrinsically motivated: “All my life I've practically been doing things for myself. Always been my biggest supporter. I've always been my own motivation”. Tafadzwa from Zimbabwe could relate by saying, “I was alone so there was that whole thing you know, like you, you are away from home…”.

It would appear that a sense of belonging would have helped certain participants and this could have been facilitated through an entrepreneurship education programme that presents itself as a packaged support system for students. In addition to fostering a sense of belonging, entrepreneurship education has been shown to, through the use of a simulation board game, improve resilience and self-esteem (consider, for example Prihadi et al., 2018).

A related notion to a sense of belonging and social connection is that of social inclusion and exclusion. Anele “They just didn't like ask us. They just asked only white people”. Randy, captured his feelings of exclusion when he said: “...you don't necessarily feel like you belong there. You really think, what is this person thinking. Do they really want me here now?” Naledi, too, communicated her difficulties with connecting: “Like such diverse people so it made it awkward, when I try and speak this one is Xhosa, [and] this one speaks Afrikaans”. Two participants revealed how they had to actively seek inclusion. André stated: “You have to engage with people. If you don't, you can’t get anywhere fast because you can't do everything on your own” whereas Anele confirmed: “You have to ask for help”.

Social inclusion and exclusion within higher education are not new to us. One example of this is some of the work by Chrissie Boughey. Nearly 10-years ago, Boughey (2012) reviewed social inclusion and exclusion in higher education. In her paper, Boughey recognises key concepts which bear relevance to this chapter, namely resilience and inherent deficiencies. She argues that greater emphasis on resilience is needed if South African higher education is to move away from the historical focus on inherent deficiencies. Furthermore, Boughey asserts that a move from these two juxtaposed concepts (resilience and inherent deficiencies) may provide a way forward for social inclusion in the changing higher education landscape. On the other side of the coin, is the notion of inherent assets (Nussbaum, 2001) which was discussed as part of the previous theme.

Beauty reflected the following sentiments concerning her experience of feeling excluded as an international student: “It was a bit tough for me to even ask questions in class because I remember when we studied I was the only international student from Zimbabwe”. She went on to express feeling excluded due to her gender: “Especially female ladies, I would actually say especially females. It has a lot of a pressure on us”.

Students experience pressure in different ways and due to varying reasons. Jason expressed experienced pressure due to the risk of economic exclusion and explained how it propelled him on the one hand:

I don't have a desire to further my studies. I feel sort of pressured 'cause sooner or later I will be the one who...the others will depend on in terms of my family and so on, so...I feel it's best for me to get into industry now. Get established and things like that so that I can as soon as I can also help out.

On the other hand, the pressure also seemed to have prevented him from seeking help: “I just sometimes felt I didn't have the time, like I'm under pressure in the hour or two that I would have spent [at] that student counselling. I could have actually spent on studying”.

Other students did attend counselling, such as Naledi:

I also went for counselling it also had a lot of impact. I went for mentoring. It did help me a lot. I went for tutoring. It helped me a lot. I attended WELA [Women in Engineering Leadership Association]… It helped me in terms of my inner strength, self-esteem, self-concept. You know in that sense because they all offered different support throughout my career.

Another student was Taj who had the following to say about his therapeutic experience: "I don't remember her name but the lady… um, helped me so much that I managed to pull myself together after that”. However, Anele’s experience was quite the opposite to that described by Naledi and Taj as she mentioned how she struggled to find assistance: “It's like professional, like cold” She further stated, “I feel like if I have a problem I have to go somewhere. I have to be able to go somewhere. There has to be a solution somewhere”. Katlego expressed the tension between maintaining self-care and preforming academically “...you still have to take care of your mental health and try to be as social as possible so that you don't lose your mind at some point. It takes a big toll on us as students”. These findings remind us that these students feel that they should be able to support themselves through their challenges without acknowledging that most of the difficulties they face are systemic and structural in nature. In his study on academic resilience, Morales (2008) considers the mental states of academically resilient individuals in contextualising resilience. This inclusion of mental health is significant as it was earlier alluded to as a risk factor. In this sense, the current investigation of the perceptions of engineering students’ academic resilience should not be understood as a suggestion that the socio-cultural and socio-ecological contexts have no impact on the choices and opportunities that they have. Rather, it is to suggest that these possibilities are facilitated by mechanisms that enable and constrain students’ learning outcomes and ultimately how they transition academically.

15 Implications and Recommendations

Insight into students’ perceptions of their own resilience will help to foster deeper understanding of the intrapersonal construction and interpretation of academic resilience and may aid theorisation on the topic. For these participants, once they arrived at university, there appears to have been a clear need for increased responsibility, independence and an intentional change of what may have previously worked for them to be successful within secondary education or high school.

The analysis provides insights from engineering students’ and their understanding of how entrepreneurship may be able to contribute to their academic resilience. This is important in terms of targeted student support, especially in the changing context of new engineering qualifications. It is hoped that the findings will inform learning and teaching policies and practices pertaining specifically to student coaching and advising initiatives, as well as benefit prospective BEngTech students who envision studying at South African institutions of higher education. All the participants with prior work experience, worked outside of the field of engineering. This brings attention to the need for students to gain experience in their respective fields of study to better their chances of employment. Entrepreneurship education can provide participants with both work experience, support networks and the opportunity to better their financial income.

Entrepreneurship education is but one mechanism which must be supplemented by other support mechanisms that engage young people. What we found is that young people need a packaged support that speaks to their psychosocial, educational and economic needs. The successful transition of engineering students from the higher education sector is severely impacted by the lack of a packaged support system. What this means is that young people remain frustrated as they move from pillar to post looking for different kinds of support.

16 Concluding Remarks

In conclusion, a youth development approach to entrepreneurship education is one that would allow us to view engineering students as inherently capable. This chapter brought to the fore the importance of understanding that the transitions of engineering students are impacted by various factors that ultimately lead to exclusion in a myriad of ways. From a youth development standpoint, this is important as it speaks to the ways in which young people should be engaged. As such, a transformed entrepreneurship education is one that seeks to go beyond presenting itself as a standalone support mechanism. Instead, it is one that would engage the needs of engineering students on multiple levels to enhance their academic resilience.