Student's Motivations to Enter the Associate's Degree of Technical and Vocational Higher Education Courses

Motivation is the basis of the conscious behavior of individuals and there are various motivations for choosing a field of study, type of study course, and university. The purpose of this study was to investigate the motivation of students to enter the technical and vocational higher education course. The statistical population of the study was composed of 1020 student of technical and vocational higher education course in the educational centers in the academic year of 1994-95 and from that 346 students were selected using the Kerjesie and Morgan tables and through stratified random sampling technique.The research instrument was a questionnaire that its validity was reviewed and confirmed by a group of relevant experts. The reliability of the questionnaire was confirmed by pretest and Teta coefficient (Ө = 0.94). Factor analysis showed that student motivations are detected in six dimensions including: Occupational and Individual, Educational – Institutional, Compulsory environment and media Advertising, Insist and recommend friends and parents, Entering to university and earning a degree of education and Financial constraints and appropriate tuition. Occupational and individual factor was identified as the most important factor. The average comparison between student's motivation and gender was shown that girl and boy students had significant different in the first factor. Comparison of the average of the motivating factors and the student's job status at the time of study as shown that there were significant differences between employed and unemployed students in terms of occupational and individual, educational – institutional factors.