| dc.description.abstract | Career related decisions are complicated and have broad and long term consequences that are not always obvious. Therefore, the present study assessed factors associated with choice of the course among university students taking a case study of School of Statistics and Planning, Makerere University. It employed a cross-sectional research design where a sample of 120 first year students from the five courses were interviewed using a well-designed and pretested questionnaire installed in KoboCollect that facilitated computer-assisted personal interviewing. The collected data was exported to SPSS version 25 for data processing and analysis which was done at univariate and bivariate levels
In the results, the two sex categories were equally represented, over 48% of the respondents were aged 20-15, 35.8% were aged 15-19 and 15.8% were aged 25 years and above. A slightly higher percentage (43.3%) of the respondents was residing in hostels, 27.5% in university halls, 17.5% were renting and 11.7% were commuting from their homes. A considerate percentage (58.4%) of the respondents was privately sponsored and the same percentage (20.8%) were sponsored by government and on scholarships by different organizations like MasterCard. More so, respondents were asked about their current CGPA, 39.2% had second class upper, 27.5% had pass degrees, 17.5% had second class lower, 8.3% had first class and 7.5% had CGPA below 2.00. Bivariate analysis revealed that family members and friends, one`s academic ability and gender significantly influenced student’s choice of course at university.
There is need for more guidance from family members, friends and student’s mentors at earlier stages of education in order to enable students mainly focus on their academic path other than waiting for results for them to choose their respective courses at university. More so, there is need to avail information about different courses to students in their earlier stages of education. This will enable them focus as early as possible in order to do their preferred courses and also ease their choice of courses when time reaches. The researcher recommends more follow up on the academic performance of students in their respective courses in order to assess if students that are highly influenced by different factors perform them better | en_US |
