Factors Affecting University Choice: A Study on University Freshman Students 1
,Orhan ATAMAN2, ,Adem YURDUNKULU4
3 1
Assoc.Prof., Duzce University, Faculty of Education, Department of Educational Sciences 2 Instructor., Duzce University, School of Foreign Language 3 Instructor., Kocaeli University, School of Foreign Language 4 Teacher, Cumayeri Middle School, Düzce Email:
[email protected],
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Abstract This study aims to investigate the factors having important impacts on stud of the potential factors which affect their university preferences will be examined. Literature review reveals that there can ety, major, career, quality and popularity of university. This study was guided by two research questions as follows: 1) To what extent do; i) quality perception and popularity of universities, ii) geographical location of universities, iii) facilities of universities, iv) centralized university ording to demographic variables such as; gender, type of graduated high school, major, social-economic status, centralized university examination results? This study was framed within quantitative paradigm. A descriptive survey design will be used to describe factors that and the advantage of survey research is that it has the potential to provide a great deal of information obtained from a large sample of individuals (Fraenkel, Wallen, & Hyun, 2011). Data were collected as paper-based in spring semester of 2017 academic year among freshman students, 400, enrolled to two different universities located at north-west part of Turkey. Factors Affecting created firstly by requesting 30 volunteer students to write a composition about their university preferences. Then along with the compositions, literature review and area experts were used to develop draft scale. The scale included 47 items with 5point Likert, facilities of university, centralized university examination results, expectations of families and social environment. Factor analysis will be used to validate FAUC scale. Researchers will apply Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to examine the underlying dimensionality o and sufficiency of data for EFA (Worthington & Whittaker, 2006). Percentages and frequencies will be used to analyze demographic variables. Mean and standard deviation will be used to describe the importance of factors that affect university school type, faculty, socio-economic status in terms of dimensions of FAUC scale. T-test will be used to compare gender and and dependent variables. Keywords: Freshman, University Choice, University Preference, University Popularity
