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Description
As the global market leader in international higher education, the US has seen a 28% growth in international student enrollments within the last 5 years. While students from China, India, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan have continued to dominate in terms of overall enrollment numbers, the recent growth in student enrollments from other countries, particularly from several emerging markets, has been nothing short of monumental. Specifically, Saudi Arabian and Vietnamese student enrollment in the US increased by 558.5% and 223.9% from AY 2005/06 to AY 2010/11, respectively. This growth suggests that there are factors within countries of origin that influence, shape and constrain stages of the decision-making process of international students when choosing to migrate abroad for higher education. This study develops an international student market research instrument, composed of a series of questions, in order to "map" student extrinsic migratory factors (institutional and environmental contexts) in the initial stage of the decision process to study abroad. This instrument is applied to 5 international student markets with the highest growth in student numbers in the US from AY 2005/06 to AY 2010/11, (Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, China, Brazil and South Korea) in order to demonstrate the conditions necessary to predispose students to migrate abroad. In integrating Chen's Synthesis Model with push-pull migratory concepts developed by McMahon (1992), Mazzarol and Soutour (2002) Boyd and Grieco (2003) Kolster (2010) and Becker and Kolster (2012), this study is based on the theoretical foundation of students' choice in the first stage of the decision process whether to migrate (predisposition phase-stage (1) abroad for study. It assumes that international students' decisions to leave their country of origin to study at a higher educational institution abroad are directly influenced, shaped and constrained by institutional and environmental contexts, (otherwise known as extrinsic factors), significant others (family and spouses), and students' individual characteristics which push students from their country of origin toward host countries and pull student toward host countries away from their country of origin (2007). As much of prevailing international student recruitment literature has focused primarily on host countries and their institutions pull factors in the second and third stages of the decision process, and has given little attention to the push factors which create the impetus to migrate, it is only the push factors in the predisposition stage for which research questions are developed.
