Browsing by Author "Lawal, Oyewale Dhıkrulah"

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    Doctoral Thesis
    Factors Affecting International Students’ Study Destination
    (2022) Lawal, Oyewale Dhıkrulah; Öztürkoğlu, Ömer
    Factors affecting international students in making their choice of destination are critical indicators that actors in the educational industries find so critical to explore and understand. This study underwent a comprehensive and multi-methodological approach to understanding these critical factors. As countries have started the utilization of international education as another source of soft power, the government is looking for the best strategy to position themselves in a way to attract international students. This has prompted the need in optimizing the best approach of using these factors by the actors to employ in fulfilling their organizational objectives. To examine the factors that affect international students' study destinations, this study comprises three different studies with different objectives and methodologies in order to understand these factors. The methodologies employed are qualitative analysis (interview approach), quantitative analysis (questionnaire approach), and experts' analysis (using the Fuzzy-DEMATEL approach). An emerging factor was discovered in the interview method with factors in literature used for the quantitative analysis. 64 items were used to design a questionnaire that was administered to 788 international students and presented 8 component factors regarding the factors influencing international students' destinations. The results after considering international students' and experts' opinions, presented sets of important factors that should be focused on by the policymaker for their marketing strategies. It also shows that University ranking is the most significant while the Attractiveness of the campus and facilities within it is the least significant factor in the experts' opinion. The strength of the relationship of each pair of factors was also classified as 'very strong', 'strong' and 'medium' relationships which constitute the strategy map was also highlighted. The map serves as the ideal tool for policymakers to know how to best strategize to achieve their institution objectives after understanding their own competitive potentials.