Chinese Postgraduate Choices When Considering a UK Business and Management Programme

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We firstly thank previous researchers who have made contributions to the field of study - student choices of studying abroad. Their research findings have enlightened our research direction and interests in investigating how and why Chinese students chose to study a UK university’s postgraduate taught business and management programme rather than other countries'. From the academic perspective, our research has filled the gap in the field by focusing on segmenting the niche market’ - Chinese business and management postgraduates’ from other nationalities, education levels and programmes of studies in the UK. After having evaluated previous research work in the last three decades, we found this in common with Pimpa (2003) and Chen (2007) about that international student choices of a study destination is not something that one size can fit all. Evidence showed that International student’ choice sets/stages and the choices related factors/variables varied in a destination, due to: (1) their nationality (Mazzarol and Soutar, 2001; Pimpa, 2003), (2) the educational level (Pimpa, 2003) and (3) the programme of study [i.e. the findings of Lowe (2007) versus the findings of Soo and Elliot (2008)]. In this research, we surveyed over 800 Chinese students who enrolled on the programme in the Northwest universities of the UK in the academic 2011/12. Our findings have recommended the areas for future researchers who wishes to study the Chinese market in the field. From the perspective of UK Higher Education managerial and marketing practice, our findings indicates various marketing strategies that would be hopefully useful for British Council and UK universities to market the programme in China.

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