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 en- trepreneurship. 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 recommenda- tions 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.