Socio-economic factors shaping students’ enrolment decisions in JCT training programs: a quantitative study

The paper investigates seven socio-economic factors influencing Saudi students’ perception of enrolling in Jeddah College of Technology (JCT). The student survey is composed of 340 students pooled in three strata, i.e., sampling by department, by living place, and by students’ seniority at the JCT. The study has used a five-point Likert scale questionnaire, which was analysed using the Chi-square test. The prevalence of the socio-economic factors is appraised using an original ranking method, which combines the Chi-square significance level and the pooling method. The study findings disclosed that the primary motivating factors to enrol at the JCT are, in order, the “location proximity”, the “family professional success”, and the “job availability at graduation”, and equally the “parents’ aspiration” with the “society esteem”. The “Peers' influence” and the “Aversion to theoretical classes” factors are not influential with regard to the students’ perception. To account for the inflation of Type I error rates resulting from multiple comparisons, a Holm-Bonferroni correction was applied. Only one factor, “location proximity”, was interpreted as statistically significant despite that the Cramer’s V of the other factors shows a medium association with students’ perception.