Graduate Working Adults’ Intention to Pursue a Postgraduate Course: A Look at Planned Behavior and Information Satisfaction

Malaysia is moving towards becoming a high-income nation through innovation-led and knowledge-driven economy by 2020 – a goal to be supported by 48,000 local PhD holders but is still far from fully achieved. This study aims to assess the determinants of graduate working adults’ intention to pursue a postgraduate study. The finding reveals that attitude towards behavior, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control contribute significantly to the intention of further study. The importance-performance map also confirms that these variables fall into the ‘keep up the good work’ quadrant. However, the moderating effect of information satisfaction is lacking. In brief, majority of graduate working adults show positive attitudes, receive positive social influence from people close to them and they believe to have the control over the enabling factors to pursue a postgraduate course at a higher education institution

Keywords:

Theory of Planned Behaviour , Postgraduate , Graduate Working Adults , Higher Education Institution , Intention