Attitudes toward entrepreneurship and digitalization: How they shape high school students' readiness to start a business

Abstract

This paper examines the association between students' attitudes toward digitalization and their entrepreneurial readiness in Romanian technical and vocational high schools. We analyze 11th-12th graders (aged 16–19) engaged in the Practice Firm (PE) or Firma de Exercitiu (FE) program, a pedagogical simulation of a real company. Using a sample of 700+ respondents, we combine descriptive statistics, contingency tables, and structural equation modeling (SEM) with a sociological reading to map links between pro-digital attitudes, understanding of how firms work, entrepreneurial capital, gender, and residence. Results show that girls report confidence in digital tools comparable to boys, and rural students view digitalization as a way to overcome geographic disadvantages. We frame these patterns as digital symbolic capital: pro-digital attitudes that convert into self-reported readiness within the educational “field” of PE, aligning with diffusion-of-innovation and EU AI/ digital literacy agendas.