Determinants of Awareness, Consideration, and Choice Set Size in University Choice

ABSTRACT

Understanding what factors affect undergraduate student search processes in their choice of a university is a topic that is important for both administrators and academic researchers. This is especially the case for markets in which there are a large number of universities (or brands) that are competing with each other to attract the potential students. In such situations, there is an enormous amount of available information which is clearly beyond the information processing capacity of any single student. Though there is a growing body of empirical-based literature on this topic, no research has examined the factors which affect the size of the students' awareness set, consideration set, and choice set. So in order to begin to fill this gap in the literature, we develop and test a model of brand choice using five individual-level variables (ethnic group, age, gender, number of parents going to university, and academic ability) and one situational variable (duration of search) to explain the variation in the size of these three decision sets. Findings from our study have important theoretical and managerial implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Undergraduate university choice processes
• phased-decision strategies
• pre-purchase information search outcomes
• model development and testing