What Motivates Students Engaging with Public Universities: A Case in Vietnam

Abstract

The fierce competition among educational institutions further affirms the role of maintaining student cohesion as an important strategy for each institution's existence and development. Therefore, the need to better understand this topic for both academics and managers is getting more and more interesting. The relationships between student engagement, and motives have been investigated through several studies in developed countries context, but they have not yet been properly considered for developing countries. An appropriate method - MEC- explored the motivations that force students to engage with the educational institutions in this study. The results show that the five main student engagement motivations include career orientation, financial relevance, memorable emotion, meaningful behaviour, and self-enhancement. This result is expected not only to provide more information for education administrators in determining the factors motivating student engagement with a specific institution but to complement knowledge to the literature foundation of student engagement.