ANALYSIS OF THE MOTIVES AND SOURCES OF INFORMATION IN THE CHOICE OF UNIVERSITY

Abstract

Career guidance constitutes a key process to help pre-university students in their career choice. To collect information in more than ten high schools located in Teruel province, a group of professors of the Business Administration and Management degree at Teruel Campus made an onsite visit to provide information to the high school students. With this information in mind, the objective of this work is to evaluate the sources of information available to students, the moment at which they choose their degree, as well as the reasons to do it, particularly referred to the institution where to study. We used the information collected from a questionnaire filled out by a wide sample of high school students (n=1144) from the academic course 2013/14 to the 2018/19. Our results consolidate the idea that students postpone their decision on what to study, it is confirmed that their main sources of information are not their teachers and that the main reasons to choose a particular academic institution are not related to the quality of the institution. These results should be useful to guidance practitioners working with high school students in their process of choosing university studies.