An evaluation of extant research reveals a significant blind spot around investigating the enrolment decision-making of Indian international students in the STEM fields. This study qualitatively explores the motivations of Indian international students to pursue a STEM Master's program in an industrialised country. To elicit pertinent information,…

Hundreds of colleges have changed their names to signal higher quality. We estimate how this affects college choice and the labor market performance of college graduates. Administrative data show that name-changing colleges enroll higher-aptitude students, with larger effects for attractive-but-misleading name changes and among students with less…

Recently, there has been an increase in the Higher Education (HE) options (in terms of both courses and institutions) available to students in the UK. Given that the choice of institution and field of study are crucial for students' future careers, we investigated how attributes of the institutions and courses determine students' choices, and how…

Amidst global competition in higher education, colleges and universities adopt strategies that mimic and adapt business practices. Branding is now a widespread practice in higher education; multimodal advertisement is a manifestation of emerging branding strategies for universities. While the visibility of brands in higher education has grown…

Previous research studies identified country image as an important variable in international students' selection of onshore programs, and it is often perceived that there is little difference between onshore and offshore program selection. Looking at a sample of high school students in China and their selections of offshore programs (from a sample…

In the era of globalization, accountability, and benchmarking, university rankings have achieved a kind of iconic status. The major ones--the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU, or the "Shanghai rankings"), the QS (Quacquarelli Symonds Limited) World University Rankings, and the "Times Higher Education" World…

Latinos make up the fastest growing population in the United States. However, this group has some of the lowest educational outcomes (Gandara & Contreras, 2009). Although large numbers of Latinos fail to achieve high levels of academic success, some Latinos are able to accomplish educational outcomes that compare with those of the most…

This quantitative study is concerned with what determines prospective university students' first choice between universities of different status. The results suggest that examination performance, going to an independent school and fear of debt independently affect students' decisions. Social factors and students' perceived level of information on…

This paper examines why the development of a world class university system represents a rational, even inevitable, policy approach for Australia in response to world university rankings. It assembles evidence questioning the value of policies which direct undue emphasis on the concentration of resources and the development of elite universities,…

This summer, Forbes magazine published its new rankings of "America's Best Colleges," implying that it had developed a methodology that would give the public the information that it needed to choose a college wisely. "U.S. News & World Report," which in 1983 published the first annual ranking, just announced its latest ratings last week--including…

This study attempts to identify the factors perceived to be important in choosing an Institution of Higher Learning (IHL) for distance learning. One thousand five hundred questionnaires were distributed to the first year students in the social sciences distance learning programs and 980 valid responses were received of Malaysian public university.…

Here, the narratives of a group of non-traditional students who entered traditional UK universities are examined. A number of participants felt there was a kind of romance or exotic quality to the sights, sounds and smells of traditional institutions, which constituted part of the attraction. The process of becoming a student at an elite or…

The estimation of a comprehensive model describing student perceptions of college quality permits the determination of the relative importance of the influences that affect these perceptions. This knowledge is instrumental for directing efforts toward improving perceptions and for evaluating the effectiveness of changes in recruitment practices.…

Factors that 1983 National Merit and National Achievement Semifinalists in Maryland felt influenced their college choice were studied. The 143 survey respondents were asked to indicate how important 22 factors were in the selection of a college. The factors covered items dealing with the characteristics of the college, efforts by the institution…