Developing a Model of University-Discipline Choice of Postgraduate Applicants in Electrical Engineering Discipline

In recent years, higher education in Iran has faced a variety of problems, such as university extra seats, unemployment of graduates, and so on, which cause critical challenges to educational planners and policy makers. Examining main determinants of the applicants’ choice is an important remedy to thses challenges that can be done through developing an appropriate university-discipline choice model. Results derived from such a model, can help educational planners to rectify the challenges and also improve the quality of the applicants’ choices. In other words, understanding the university choice models of applicants helps to understand university choice behavior in Iran and to improve the quality of their university choice, higher education policies, and the decisions of university administrators. In this article, the model of university choice and its determinants in terms of gender, occupation, and residence are designed and estimated using data on the characteristics of a randomly selected sample of participants in the 1397 entrance exam of Electrical Engineering master degrees. The data included information on the field chosen by participants who were allowed to choose the study field and select at least one university-location course. The results of the analyses emplying Rank-ordered logistic model, show a high tendency of the applicants to attend the state universities located in Tehran city and the capitals of Iran’s provinces. Women tend to prefer Tehran more than men and unemployed tend to be significantly more exposed to the daily courses of Tehran city universities.