An importance performance-performance analysis of African students' perception on enrolling at Thai Universities

Abstract

This study focuses on African students’ perception on enrolling at Thai Universities using the Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA), so the objectives are set to describe the African students’ perception of their university experience upon studying in Thailand and identifying the extent to which these perceptions can lead to what Thai universities services for them. The reason behind the need to study on perception on enrolling at Thai Universities is that these universities are no exception when it comes to marketing on international studies as such there has been an influx of students from all over the world who study at Thai universities, so in order to understand what makes international students leave their home countries to study in Thailand, that alone signifies the importance of Thai universities to international education, thereby bringing more reasons to understand the perceptions of enrolling students to these universities. The researcher distributed the questionnaire to five universities within the greater Bangkok metropolitan, including Salaya sub-district in Nakhon Pathom province and Pathum Thani province. The universities engaged in this study are Assumption university, Mahidol university, Rangsit university, Ramkhamhaeng university and Kasem Bundit university. Out of the 400 enrolling African students respondents from these five universities 207 respondents were male, representing 51.8%, while 193 respondents were females, representing 48.3%. Thus the majority of enrolling African students in Thai universities within Bangkok metropolitan and surrounding provinces are male. The IPA in this study is based on five elements which include: academic aspects, access, administrative support, programs issues, reputation and 30 attributes of the students’ perception of the five elements and 6 attributes on demographics. There in total five hypotheses tested using paired sample t-test and the results indicate that four out of five hypotheses have the significant difference at the level of p>0.05 except academic aspects.