With 114 entrepreneurial students and 94 non-entrepreneurial university students as subjects and by collecting subjects’ reaction to self-made complex opportunity situation to investigate their opportunity recognition, the paper discusses the influence of university students’ entrepreneurial alertness, prior knowledge and entrepreneurial experiences on the opportunity recognition. The results showed that: 1 There is significant difference between two types of university students’ entrepreneurial alertness and prior knowledge; entrepreneurial students are significantly better than non-entrepreneurial university students. Students’ prior knowledge greatly influences the opportunity recognition; the entrepreneurial alertness of non-entrepreneurial students significantly influences the opportunity recognition, which shows that prior knowledge of university students influences the opportunity recognition via entrepreneurial alertness.