An examination of two case studies used in building a decision-making model

Higher education in Australia contributed almost $3 billion to the Australian economy in 2000 and education has become an essential source of export profits. Australia now provides university places for over six per cent of the global student population. However, there is little empirical research undertaken in that domain. The research underpinning this paper addresses this problem by focusing on students from Singapore, which represent an overseas student client group of Asia. It sets out to explore personal, environmental and behavioural factors that influence educational decisions of students from Singapore, and to build a model that represents the complex interaction of factors and processes involved. While a built model is the major objective, the focus of this paper is on one component, the two interpretive, in-depth case studies. These present an interpretive phenomenological perspective that represents the complexity of individual experiences and supplements the quantitative research and building of a descriptive decision-making model.