Senior year high school pupils’ segmentation based on the benefits and costs considered in decesion making process of educational choices

Attracting financial resources is an important issue for universities. Because for universities is impossible to cover from state budget the whole costs of education, the importance of attracting students has increased. As the pupils’ needs and wishes are heterogeneous, in order to better understand the decision making process, universities must divide the educational market in smaller homogeneous segments. Although the segmentation concept and the decision making process of educational choices are widely approached in literature, articles on the pupils' segmentation are very scarce. The present market segmentation was carried out based on the level of importance of various benefits and costs to pupils when they decide whether to enroll in a higher education institution. The considered benefits are the possibility of meeting new people, development of knowledge from high school, getting a bachelor's degree, acquiring knowledge and skills required for employment, development of general culture and the student life. The considered costs are submission fee, tuition fee, time to study, mental effort to learn, long term before graduation and reducing time for hobbies. The method used for segmentation is the K-mean cluster analysis. To assess the internal cohesion of the cluster we determined the average sum of squares error while to determine the differences among the clusters were used ANOVA and posthoc Tukey tests. The results enable university managers to better understand pupils' needs and to conceive marketing strategies for attracting and recruiting students.