Afghan students’ willingness to continue their studies abroad and the related factors: A study of Afghan students studying at selected Afghan universities of medical sciences in the academic year 2019-2020

The purpose of this study was to identify the educational needs and interests of students and the satisfaction of these in order to pave the way for attracting foreign students to study at Iranian universities. In this descriptive study, 320 students were randomly selected based on the ratio of the number of university students to the number of students in different fields. In order to collect the necessary data for the research, a questionnaire including demographic information and research questions was used. The questionnaire was scored based on a five-point Likert scale. To analyze the research questions, descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (one-sample t-test, independent two-sample t-test, one-way analysis of variance, post hoc scheffe test, and Friedman test were used.Participants of this study included 320 students from different majors at Afghan universities who wanted to continue their studies abroad. Of these, 60 (31.9%) chose India and 59 (31.3%) chose Iran as their destination. Also, 177 (55.3%) of them considered educational facilities as the most important factor in choosing a country to continue their studies whereas 94 (29.4%) considered university reputation as the most important factor in choosing a target university.