UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY International School of Business ------------------------------ Lê Thị Hồng An ANTECEDENTS OF STUDENTS’ INTENTION TO STUDY ABROAD IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN EMPIRICAL RESEARCH IN VIETNAM MASTER OF BUSINESS (Honours) Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2014 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY International School of Business ------------------------------ Lê Thị Hồng An ANTECEDENTS OF STUDENTS’ INTENTION TO STUDY ABROAD IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN EMPIRICAL RESEARCH IN VIETNAM ID: 22120041 MASTER OF BUSINESS (Honours) SUPPERVISOR: DR. LE NGUYEN HAU Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2014 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor - Dr. Le Nguyen Hau, who has given me great guidance, valuable advice, suggestions that helping me in implementing this study. I would also like to express my sincere thanks to ISB Research Council who gave valuable recommendations throughout my thesis’s periods as well as all professors, tutors and officers of ISB - MBus Program for academic knowledge and assistance throughout the program at International School of Business.
Last but not least, I am grateful to Principals, Vice Principals and teachers at Saigon International College, Nguyen Thuong Hien high school, Le Quy Don high school and Gia Dinh high school for their advice and support in collecting the information. Without their support, I could not complete my thesis. Thank you, Le Thi Hong An i TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com Table of content List of Tables. iv List of Figures.1 Studying abroad in higher education in Vietnam .2 Existing studies about factors that impact on study oversea intention .3 SCOPE OF THE RESEARCH .4 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY.
7 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURES REVIEW AND HYPOTHESES .1 An overview about the Theory of Planned Behavior .3 Attitude toward the behavior.5 Perceived behavioral control. 16 CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHOD .2 Selection of Method Research .3 MAIN STUDY AND DATA COLLECTION.1 Sampling and sample. 25 ii TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com CHAPTER 4: DATA ANALYSIS AND RESULTS .1 DATA STATISTICAL ANALYSIS .2 MEASUREMENT SCALES ASSESSMENT.2 Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) .4 Adjusted Model And Hypotheses.1 Assumption of Multiple Regression. 43 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSIONS AND LIMITATIONS.
55 Appendix C: KMO and Bartlett's Test for Independent variables. 58 Appendix D: Cronbach’s alpha Test for AIPI construct. 58 Appendix E: Cronbach’s alpha Test for AIPP construct. 59 Appendix F: KMO and Bartlett's Test for dependent variable.
59 iii TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com List of Tables Table 3. 20 Table 4-1: Data descriptive statistics. 27 Table 4-2: Cronbach’s Alpha coefficients for each measurement scale. 29 Table 4-3: Cronbach’ Alpha results after excluding unsatisfactory items.
30 Table 4-4: Rotated Component Matrixa. 32 Table: 4-5: Total Variance Explained of independent variables. 33 Table 4-6: Total Variance Explained of dependent variable. 34 Table 4-7: Representative variables.
35 Table 4-8: Correlations between variables. 36 Table 4-9: Hypotheses testing result (Model Summary, ANOVA, Coefficients). 39 iv TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com List of Figures Figure 2.1: The theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991). 37 v TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com ABBREVIATIONS ELICOS: English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students VET: Vocational Education and Training TPB: Theory of Planned Behavior TRA: Theory of Reasoned Action ANOVA: Analysis Of Variance EFA: Explored Factor Analysis KMO: Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin SPSS: Statistical Package for Social Science vi TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com ABSTRACT Higher education has become an increasingly competitive sector for developed foreign education.
The number of countries that are actively involved in international student recruitment has grown considerably. It is important to gain a better understanding of the factors that influencing on intention to study overseas. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of key antecedents on intention of studying abroad in tertiary education of high school students in the context of Vietnam. After pilot study, a quantitative research was utilized with a sample of 289 students in some high schools in Ho Chi Minh City.
The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) was used as a framework to understand the intention to study abroad. Results indicate that the influences of attitude toward foreign education, advices of influential people and perceive behavioral control play significant role in predicting intention to study abroad of high school students. Overall, the results of this study may help foreign education institutions develop a good understanding of Vietnamese students’ behavior in selecting an institution for studying in English – speaking countries. Keywords: intention, theory of planned behavior, study abroad, higher education, Vietnamese students 1 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Chapter I introduces a background and an overview of studying abroad in higher education in Vietnam as well as existing studies about factors that impact on study oversea intention.
The Introduction also specifies the research objectives, scope of this study and significance of the research. Chapter I also provides an overview of all chapters that will be presented in this paper.1 Studying abroad in higher education in Vietnam According to the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET), over 100,000 Vietnamese students are studying abroad in 47 countries and territories. Among them, about 90% is self-funded study. Viet Nam has become a productive market for international institutions (Vietnamnet, 2013).
International education is a growing export industry for many developed countries. The US’ Open Doors 2011 report showed that the number of Vietnamese students in the country increased by 14% during the 2010-2011 academic year. Vietnam ranks eighth among countries and territories sending students to the US, a considerable increase compared to the 20th place five years ago and around 72.1% of Vietnamese students in the US pursued tertiary education. More and more Vietnamese apply for studying at the schools in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Singapore and so on.
The list of the destination countries for Vietnamese students has been expanded. (Dantri, 2012) A report of Australian Education International (2014) stated that following China and India, Vietnam is currently the third largest international student source market for Australia. Among the higher education, ELICOS, VET and school sectors, the proportion of higher education sector is high with 44%. 2 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com There is a growing trend of students studying overseas under scholarships as well as self-funded.
Australia, US, Britain, Canada and France were early market entrants. Besides, emerging education markets such as Singapore, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Thailand, Germany, South Korea, and Japan have all increased efforts to attract Vietnamese students with scholarships, education exhibitions and other recruitment activities. Thus, Vietnam’s international education market is highly competitive. The growth of Vietnamese students studying abroad is an opportunity for foreign institutions in countries that have a developed education such as United Stated, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and so on.
However, study abroad has also become an educational activity for many foreign institutions that compete to attract students. To attract Vietnamese students who intend to study abroad, there are many higher education fairs that organized every year such as Australian education exhibitions, Study USA Higher Education Fairs, UK education festivals, and so on. This means more and more international institutions have involved Vietnam market and make the higher education become an increasingly competitive sector. Hence, to study the factors that affect students’ intention to study abroad in higher education is the important part of marketing strategy planning for student’s recruitment of foreign institutes.2 Existing studies about factors that impact on study oversea intention There are a numerous researches about factors influencing choice of study abroad as Zhang, Sun and Hagedorn (2013) summarized, for instance, a research of Barnick (2006) in the context of Canada, students considered studying in a different country as an investment to their future success by becoming global citizens and 3 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com internationally competent knowledge-workers; Maiworm and Teichler (1995) claimed that European students were motivated to study abroad to learn a foreign language, gain a better understanding of the host country, and improve career prospects.
A study with a focus on American students (Carlson, Burn, Useem, & Yachimovicz, 1990) indicated that students were seeking opportunities overseas to enhance their future careers. Besides, some studies of international students from Indonesia, Taiwan, India, and mainland China (Mazzarol & Soutar, 2002) identified 14 common factors impacted international students' decision to pursue a degree in Australia. These factors included “students' positive perception of education abroad, accessibility of information on the host country, students' knowledge of the host country, educational quality in the host country, recognition of a foreign degree in the home country, recommendations from family and friends, costs of education in home and host countries, a low crime rate, a presence of students from the home country, and family ties in the host country.” (Zhang, Sun & Hagedorn, 2013, p. 141) In addition, a report by the Australian Education International office (2005) also outlined several factors that may have an impact on participation in study abroad.
Among these are university educated parents, previous personal international travel experience, family income, program cost, local commitments to work or living (Naffziger, Bott, & Mueller, 2008). According to a survey of university graduates of Baker et al. (1996), the most significant factors attracting overseas students to Australia were the high quality of institutions, quality of courses, good reputation of courses in field, and the potential for improved job prospects when returning their home. Besides analyzing the factors that have impact on study abroad, there are few researches using of theoretical models, such as, the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to examine student motivations for overseas study in some contexts of America, Taiwan, and China.
For instance, in the context of America, there are 4 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com studies of Adrien Presley, Dathat Damron-Martinez & Lin Zhang (2010): A study of business student choice to study abroad: A test of the theory of planned behavior; and Schnusenberg, O. (2012): Predicting study abroad intentions based on the theory of Planned Behavior; a research of Rachel Bobbitt & Cindy Akers (2013) is Going Global: Study Abroad Intentions of Agriculture and Natural Resource Students in Taiwan context; and a research namely The relationship between attitude and behavior: an empirical study in China (Jianyao Li, Dick Mizerski, Alvin Lee & Fang Liu, 2009) in China context. These studies used the TBP to predict the intention to study abroad of students and the results affirmed that TPB predictors were highly correlated with the intention. In addition, as Knabe (2012) states that Ajzen’s model has received substantial research support in recent years from social scientists (Ajzen, 2011; Sideridis, Kasissidis, & Padeliadu, 1998).
One of the major strengths of the Theory of Planned Behavior is that it is widely applicable to a variety of behaviors in different contexts, including such diverse areas as health communications, environmental concerns, risk communication and so on. The theory has been used successfully in hundreds of different studies in the last two decades (Ajzen, 2011). This study offers another opportunity to test the model and apply it to test the theoretical sufficiency of the Theory of Planned Behavior in study oversea industry. In summary, there have been a lot of literatures on students’ enrollment study abroad such as Dembowski, 1980; Chapman, 1981; Coccari and Javalgi, 1995; Broekemier and Seshadri, 1999; Baharun et al., 2001; Dalgety and Coll, 2004 (Li, Mizerski, Lee, & Liu, 2009).
However, there has been a few examination of the use of theoretical models like the theory of planned behavior, to examine student motivations for overseas study especially in Vietnam context. According to current situation of study abroad of Vietnamese students and existing researches about oversea study intention, this paper examines key antecedents that 5 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com influences on study abroad intention in Vietnam context by adopting the Theory of Planned Behavior.