Abstract
Malaysia has positioned itself to be a regional higher education hub and targeted to increase its number of international students to 250,000 by 2025, from 81,424 students in 2013. In the face of COVID-19, Malaysia is expected to experience stiff competitions with other countries in attracting international students. In essence, apart from attracting new students to come and study, pursuing the currently enrolled international students to stay on for advanced degrees is equally crucial to achieving the objective of the internationalisation agenda. Many studies have been done on factors affecting the decision of international students in choosing a host country. However, the retention and its sequential nature have been largely ignored. This paper aims to examine the probability of retention using a sequential approach. The descriptive statistics analysis found that Malaysia could expect that around 42% of its currently enrolled international students will remain in Malaysia. Results of the estimated sequential logit model reveal that university services are the significant factor that influences the probability of retention, whereas the education cost is found to be insignificant. Thus, consumption motives dominate the investment motives in terms of the probability of retention. Based on the findings, various policy implications are suggested to improve the retention rate of international students in Malaysia.
Highlights
Since the liberalisation and democratisation of higher education in 1997, Malaysia has positioned itself as a regional higher education hub
The highest number of international students are from Middle Eastern countries (31.89%), followed by African countries (24.25%), Southeast Asian countries (19.60%), East Asian countries (11.96%), and other regions (12.29%)
The consumption motive seems more important than the investment motive
Summary
Since the liberalisation and democratisation of higher education in 1997, Malaysia has positioned itself as a regional higher education hub. Even with the pandemic of COVID-19, Malaysia has targeted to attract 250,000 international students in 2025 (Hazlina, 2020). This represents almost double the number of international students, i.e., 127,583 in 2019 (Viggo, 2019). To achieve this target, inevitably, Malaysia must be ready to compete with other host countries, especially in South East Asia, in attracting international students. The initiatives taken by the Malaysian government show the seriousness of its intention in leading Malaysia towards becoming a successful regional education hub (Knight, 2011). It is important to attract qualified students and retain them to continue their postgraduate study, which concentrates more on research, development, and commercialisation (Abd Aziz Ismail & Doria Abdullah, 2014)
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