The Impact of Teaching on Graduate Entrepreneurship in the UK: Evidence from England and Scotland, 2008/09–2014/15

The Impact of Teaching on Graduate Entrepreneurship in the UK: Evidence from England and Scotland, 2008/09–2014/15

Investigating whether increased HEI teaching focus causes an improvement in graduate start-up outcomes.

October 2026

Argyris Demetriou

Universities in the UK are under growing pressure to improve their entrepreneurial output, with graduate start-ups becoming an increasingly important knowledge exchange outcome. Studies suggest that graduate start-up outcomes are linked to resources invested in a university’s ‘teaching’ mission, such as entrepreneurial education and training. However, results remain mixed and associational. This paper therefore asks whether increased university teaching focus causes an increase in graduate start-up creation and turnover. Using data from the Higher Education – Business and Community Interaction survey from 2008/09 to 2014/15, this paper exploits the 2012 tuition fee reform in England to proxy for an increased focus on English universities’ teaching missions and estimates a difference-in-differences model with Scottish universities as a control. The results show that after the reform, there was a significant increase in English graduate start-up creation compared to Scotland. The result is not driven by elite or London-based institutions. However, the effect loses significance in an uncontrolled specification from 2008/09 to 2024/25. There is also largely no evidence of an effect on graduate-start up turnover throughout.

Entrepreneurship, Teaching, Knowledge Exchange, Universities