Thailand as a Viable Regional Education Hub

The purpose of this research is to assess Thailand as a viable an education hub in the AEC and Asia Pacific region. Two data primary sets are used in this research. The populations of both surveys are a mix of Thai and non-Thai university students. The instrument used in this research consists of written survey soliciting quantitative, ordinal, and nominal data. The first data set comes from 80 surveys collected from university students in Bangkok to verify the type of education demanded by the market. The preliminary finding of this first data set shows that the market does not have any interests in e-learning platform. The second set of data consists of 98 surveys from the same population taken in subsequent period for further investigation. This experimental design allows the use of Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) for potentially new independent variables (IV) not yet treated in the literature. The design also allows Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) for known IVs. An empirical model for Thailand’s education hub was derived from this second data set by using the primary data for micro-state and prior years’ education market growth of Thailand as macro-state conditions. Education growth rate as part of Thailand’s economy was used as a proxy for market trend. Two layers of trend tests were used to verify growth trend in education in Thailand for a period of 10 years. The LaPlace Trend test shows a significant trend at Z = 33.97 compared to the theoretical value of 1.65. This finding was confirmed by the MH Trend Test with the result of  chi-squared = 17.47 compared to the theoretical value of 16.90. This multi-level design is a novel approach in econometric modeling for education market research. The proposed model was tested for reliability and validity by Monte Carlo simulation for which a new iteration method is introduced. The most likelihood estimation (MLE) method was used to validate the model. Significance test was accomplished by Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) test, likelihood ration test, Wald statistic and the New Log-Likelihood Estimation (NLLE). This study is a contribution to the field because the proposed model for education hub in Thailand has practical utility.