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The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of entrepreneurship education (EE) in the form of a business planning course on students' career intentions and preferences. While there is extensive research in which traditional survey scales have been applied to study students' entrepreneurial intentions, this study takes a novel approach by extending the construct of entrepreneurial intention to include preferences for intrapreneurship and team entrepreneurship. Furthermore, the use of conjoint analysis captures students' unconscious decision-making processes when presented with different career opportunity scenarios, thereby overcoming many of the limitations of self-reported survey measures.

The study uses a quasi-experimental design with a novel application of conjoint analysis in EE research. A two-part survey combining a traditional questionnaire with conjoint analysis was distributed to students enrolled in a business planning course at two campuses of a Norwegian university, resulting in 99 matched pre- and post-test responses.

Two main findings arise from the study. First, there is a significant decrease in entrepreneurial intention among students in the EE course. Second, the conjoint analysis contributes to a better understanding of this decrease by illustrating how students shift their career preferences from entrepreneurship to employment during the EE course. This suggests that EE provides a space for students' career reflections where they can explore, commit to and reconsider entrepreneurship as a career.

A limitation of the study is that it focuses on a small sample of undergraduate students from two campus locations in Norway. Thus, further investigation is still necessary to establish whether the findings are valid in other contexts. The research has implications for higher educational institutions, policymakers and researchers in the field of EE.

The study contributes with a novel perspective on EE as a trigger for career reflection, a perspective that is important for educators teaching EE courses, as well as for higher education institutions who decide to implement EE in study programmes.

By focusing on the development of students' career preferences through conjoint analysis, the study expands knowledge on the impact of EE on students' careers, while also accentuating the value of the application of conjoint analysis in research on EE.

The study seeks to conduct an empirical investigation on the impact of entrepreneurship education (EE) through its components, i.e. entrepreneurial knowledge (EK) and business planning (BP) on entrepreneurial intentions (EI) in India.

An electronic questionnaire was used to collect data from 340 engineering students and partial least square-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyze the collected data.

The findings revealed that EK and BP have no direct impact on EI, however, they have an indirect influence through attitude towards entrepreneurship (ATE) and perceived behavioral control (PBC), whereas subjective norms (SN) have no mediation impact on the relationships.

This research has been conducted on students of engineering background only, future studies can be carried out by incorporating more attitudinal and environmental determinants with larger data sizes from diverse educational streams.

This study is of immense significance to policymakers and educational establishments in designing the purposefully designed EE courses that can drive the entrepreneurial intentionality of students.

The study adds to the paucity of research on the systematic elaboration of EE construct underlining the specific impact of EK and BP as EE dimensions on students' EI. To the best of authors' awareness, this kind of investigation has not been conducted in indian higher educational institution (HEI) context.