Service Learning in Social Entrepreneurship Education: Why Students Want to Become Social Entrepreneurs and How to Address Their Motives

Service learning has been identified as a suitable approach to teach social entrepreneurship. However, in order to design service learning in an appropriate way, it is necessary to better understand why students want to become a social entrepreneur as opposed to a traditional entrepreneur. Thus, this study aims at identifying distinct student motives for preferring social entrepreneurship. According to our research, reasons typically mentioned by students who prefer a social entrepreneurship career over a commercial entrepreneurship career belonged to the following categories: impact, personal motives, and considering social and economic aspects. From this understanding, we derive recommendations for the design of service learning in social entrepreneurship programs. We hope that these recommendations will contribute to a student-oriented design of service learning that incorporates students’ own motives.