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Managers in higher education require cost effective ways to attract the optimal number of students. The purpose of this paper is to address that general problem at the college level, and in doing so, it points toward strategies that could also be relevant at university and at national level. Two crucial issues are whether potential students are more influenced by parents or by peers when it comes to choosing a college; and whether spending money on advertising is more efficacious than spending money on making direct contact with potential students. The findings provide essential market intelligence for strategically managing the scarce resources available for attracting students.

Data were gathered through a survey instrument and the partial least squares (PLS) technique was subsequently applied to 314 responses.

Secondary school guidance counselors, followed by current and previous college students were the highlights in order of magnitude for non-marketing information sources for college choice. Social life received the highest loadings among college attributes and phone calls from the admissions office received the highest loading among marketer controlled variables. The results reflect the nature of Chinese culture, which is regarded as being highly collectivist.

The model proposed in this study is applicable to students of sub-degree courses, but may need to be adapted to degree and postgraduate courses students.

This study helps educational managers to identify which factors most strongly influence choice of higher education provider, and as a consequence enable managers to make more strategic use of scarce resources.

This is one of very few studies which employ PLS analysis to discover the key factors that influence student selection of a higher education provider, and one of few studies that focusses on Hong Kong.

The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence to assess the nature and extent of the link between employee satisfaction and organisational performance.

This paper examines the link between staff satisfaction and organisational performance, presenting findings from 21 colleges of Further Education that have participated in both a survey of staff satisfaction (covering over 2,600 staff from these colleges) and in a diagnostic benchmarking exercise using the “Learning PROBE” methodology.

The results suggest that whilst each of the measured aspects of work are regarded as being important by a majority of survey respondents, the level of “satisfaction” displayed in each of these attributes is indicated by only a minority of those surveyed. The findings support the existence of a link between staff satisfaction and organisational excellence. Staff satisfaction levels are most strongly associated with the leadership and service processes indices, and even more so with the overall organisational diagnosis. This suggests that colleges that are implementing “good practices” covering a range of managerial aspects, and who are achieving corresponding organisational results, are likely to be closer to satisfying their staff. Practices relating to people, performance management and organizational results also show association with staff's satisfaction gap, although not as significantly as above. The results suggest an holistic approach to implementing business practices appears to be more effective than concentrating only on deploying good practices in only a single area of the managerial process.

The value of the paper is to the UK Further Education Sector in that it identifies those organisational practices, which improved, can in combination address to some extent the work satisfaction levels of their employees.

Unlike many other quantitative characteristics used to determine higher education rankings, opinion-based peer assessment scores and the factors that may influence them are not well understood. Using peer scores of US colleges of engineering as reported annually in US News and World Report (USNews) rankings, the purpose of this paper is to provide some insights into peer assessments by statistically identifying factors that influence them.

With highly detailed data, a random parameters linear regression is estimated to statistically identify the factors determining a college of engineering’s average USNews peer assessment score.

The findings show that a wide variety of college- and university-specific attributes influence average peer impressions of a university’s college of engineering including the size of the faculty, the quality of admitted students and the quality of the faculty measured by their citation data and other factors.

The paper demonstrates that average peer assessment scores can be readily and accurately predicted with observable data on the college of engineering and the university as a whole. In addition, the individual parameter estimates from the statistical modeling in this paper provide insights as to how specific college and university attributes can help guide policies to improve an individual college’s average peer assessment scores and its overall ranking.

This study attempts to elucidate the role of key influencers impacting the student decision-making process of enrollment for higher education in India from the lenses of Stephen Covey's theory on circles of life.

A sample of 556 students of Delhi NCR, India was selected based on a multi-staged sampling method. PLS-SEM was subsequently applied for statistical data analysis.

This quantitative finding voiced the relationships among the constructs in the proposed theoretical framework, i.e. Stephen Covey's circle of life theory. Additionally, it tinted the crucial role of “College attributes” in reconnoitering the relationship dynamics between key influencers (Circle of Influence and Circle of Concern) and student college choice (Circle of Control).

The present study incorporates only the first-year student population of undergraduate management courses in private universities from Delhi NCR, India limiting the generalization of findings substantially.

The study garners the attention of education policymakers on the cognizance of the role played by parents and cohorts in driving the student's decision-making process of college choice under the circle of influence.

This study is pioneering research disseminating a comprehensive outlook of the circle of life theory of great Stephen Covey engrained upon a compendious conceptual model which enlightens the landscape of the decision-making process of student on enrollment under the influence of key influencers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the apartment preferences of American and Asian college students, the sources of information they use when searching for an apartment and the media that influence their buying decision. This study examines determinant criteria in conjunction with the theory of consumption values and utilitarian versus hedonic attributes.

Data was collected from multiple apartment complexes in a metropolitan area of approximately 250,000 people with over 70,000 college students. All residents of the apartment complexes were asked to answer an online questionnaire. From those questionnaires, a total of 865 qualified to be in the sample for this research study. Qualification depended on the respondent being a college student and of either American or Asian nationality.

The apartment attributes that are found to be determinant criteria for college students are categorized according to whether they provide utilitarian or hedonic value. These two values relate to the functional and emotional values within the theory of consumption values. The majority of the apartment attributes identified as determinant criteria provide utilitarian value. Specific apartment attributes are described in the paper. The main apartment attributes for which Asian students differ from Americans center on the Asians’ desire for security and accessibility to where they want to go.

With a rising number of people renting instead of buying a home, apartment complexes continue to multiply. The majority of renters are single persons, thus, the majority of apartments should be designed to appeal to the preferences of singles. College students, both native and international, are part of this coveted consumer market. Hence, developers and marketers would be wise to consider the housing preferences of college students.

This paper contributes original information in two areas pertaining to the development and marketing of apartments: the preferences of American college students and the preferences of Asian college students.

This paper uses data from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth to estimate the changing returns to cognitive and non-cognitive skills with respect to college completion, and quantifies the extent to which gender differences in these skills are driving the college gender gap. The use of two distinct college graduation cohorts allows a dynamic analysis of the widening female advantage in college graduation. I decompose the increase in the college gender gap into three pertinent categories of measurable attributes: family background, cognitive skills, and non-cognitive skills (captured by school suspensions, behavioral problems, and legal infractions). A second decomposition is applied to the change in the gap between the two periods. The results show that roughly half of the observed college graduation gender gap in the NLSY97 is due to female advantages in observable characteristics, and roughly half is “unexplained”: due to gender differences in the coefficients. With respect to the change in the gap, approximately 29% of the difference in differences is the “explained” component, attributed to changes in the relative characteristics of men and women. In particular, declining non-cognitive skills in men are associated with about 14% of the increase in the gender gap.

The objective of the research is to evaluate the experiential branding practices of a higher education institution (HEI) in India against student perceptions.

Using a mixed-method approach for data collection, a range of relevant attributes of the experiential brand identity of the HEI was constructed. A quantitative technique called conjoint analysis was then used to understand the student-evaluated brand experience from the average relative importance of attributes and average part-worth utilities.

The study concluded that among the brand attributes of the HEI, course delivery had the highest relative importance among students, whereas price had the maximum elasticity.

This study demonstrates how a differentiated brand identity of an HEI can be built using student perceptions. HEIs can use this model to strategize brand expansion by forming meaningful external partnerships to fulfill this objective.

The study is novel and innovative in the Indian context where relatively little attention has been paid to the assessment of experiential brand identity in higher education. The research takes the first step in deconstructing the experiential brand architecture into relevant attributes and assessing their impact on student preferences.

This study seeks to identify the dimensions of web site attributes that represent online shoppers' perceptions of their favorite clothing web site and to examine the relationship with the evaluation of the relative importance of various clothing web site attributes.

US college students, who had online shopping experience and favorite clothing web sites that they especially like to visit, were surveyed. Hypothesized relationships between the relative importance of general clothing web site attributes and the perceptions of favorite clothing web sites were tested using canonical correlation analysis.

The results revealed three variables, the product information, customer service and navigation factors, were closely related to each other and create a well‐defined dimension in representing the respondents' perceptions of their favorite clothing web sites. These dimensions were fairly well predicted by the following set of independent variables: the product information, navigation, and customer service factors of general clothing web site attributes.

Results cannot be generalized to all young adult consumers and to other consumers. Future research should include other population groups.

This research offers new insights to apparel e‐tailers in building effective web sites that can attract young adult online shoppers to the company and retain them through the web sites.

This study is the first to investigate young adult online consumers' perceptions of their favorite internet web sites in relation to their evaluations of the relative importance of general clothing web sites attributes.

Aspects of intellectual competence would not be sufficient for quality teaching that requires a mix of intellectual and personal qualities. The purpose of this paper was to elicit personal attributes of teachers’ college applicants.

This qualitative case study consisted of 99 participants aged 20-24 years of average socio-economic and achievement backgrounds. The authors constructed five qualitative tools, in addition to the two existing standardized exams. Using techniques of the grounded theory, the authors sorted and synthesized the data through three-phase coding.

The authors elicited a general concept map of attributes, from which a personal attribute profile for each participant emerged. This model makes fine differentiations between individuals, providing a personal attribute profile pool of applicants useful for any admission committee and for empowering students’ strengths during studies.

A solid database of non-cognitive attributes opens the door to further research, which will take into consideration multiple variables, such as student knowledge, beliefs and aptitudes.

Training teachers to apply research methodology into practice and limiting the length of tools make the mission possible, interesting and useful. Figuring out how to collect valid measures of such data about large numbers of college students would be a major challenge.

As teachers occupy a central position in the educational enterprise, they become guardians of the country’s collective socio-cultural legacy. In the current context of teacher shortages, the authors offer a model that has the potential of improving recruitment of applicants for teaching and raising teacher quality.

No previous attempt that uses qualitative methodology for this purpose was found.

As colleges implement alternative forms of education delivery, prospective students must consider the method of instruction when choosing a post‐secondary institution. The purpose of this research paper is to assess the search criteria considered most important to prospective undergraduate students and to evaluate their preference for online versus on‐campus instruction.

This paper reviews a selection of literature on college choice behavior, with special reference to on‐campus (high‐tech) versus online (high‐touch) delivery. A pilot study together with a conjoint methodology is used to measure the importance students place on method of instruction, relative to several traditional criteria.

The conjoint results identify two unique student segments (risk‐sensitive and cost‐sensitive) based on attitudes toward high‐tech versus high‐touch delivery. While the risk sensitive segment expresses strong preference for high‐touch delivery, the cost sensitive segment is open to high‐tech delivery, if the price is right.

Many studies have concluded that online education may be more suited for mature, graduate students. This study, however, identifies an undergraduate student segment with a propensity toward high‐tech education. As online technology continues to diffuse through society, prospective undergraduates are expected to become less averse to alternate means of instruction.

Although many studies have compared online versus on‐campus learning, few, if any, have examined the attitudes of prospective students applying to a post‐secondary program, having no experience with distance education. This study focuses on the needs of prospective undergraduate students, highlighting differences in attitude toward cost and risk.