An innovative stakeholder framework for the Student-Choice Decision making process

This research explores, identifies, defines and refines the conventional tertiary-education student decision-making process, and its contextual and personal innovative multi-layered factors of stakeholder influence. Structurally and methodologically, extant works’ gaps are identified and a theoretical conceptual innovative framework is constructed through an extensive narrative-literature review that uniquely and directly conjoins stakeholder characteristics, innovative information gathering, factors of influence and the decision-making process. A quantitative survey of 617 first-semester tertiary-level students in Lebanon, with qualitative interviews and expert validation sessions, collected and coded data, and applied chi-square and simple correlation, factor analysis, and regression modelling to test and refine the conceptual framework, and to develop a final innovative tertiary education student-choice model. The value of the research stems naturally from its systematic identification, interrelation and testing of all the factors/forces involved; its incorporation of these into a single comprehensive process; and its explicit potentialities that transcend theoretical implications towards practicable entrepreneurial-managerial implementation.