Data of research article "Choosing GIS graduate programs from afar: Chinese students’ perspectives" published on Transactions in GIS.
With the increasing demands for geospatial analytics in industry and academia, the need for Geographic Information Systems/Science (GIS) education is on the rise. A growing number of departments in geography have launched or expanded their GIS graduate programs. However, the factors influencing students choosing GIS programs have not been examined yet. In this study, we looked at Chinese students applying for overseas GIS programs and examined factors influencing their decision-making. We distributed the survey in GISphere, one of the largest GIS international student communities, and 84 valid questionnaires were returned. We analyzed the spatial and demographic patterns of Chinese students applying for overseas GIS programs. We identify five main factors that affect their choices of GIS programs: (1) education quality and awareness, (2) physical, social, and political environments, (3) improved employment prospects, (4) personal recommendations, and (5) the application process. Our study offers implications for the development of GIS graduate programs. We anticipate that the conclusions drawn from this research will benefit and advance geography and GIS education globally.
Check the website: https://gisphere.github.io/
GISphere is a not-for-profit project started in 2019 that aims to provide timely and comprehensive information of global graduate-level programs in geographic information sciences (GIS)-related fields (e.g., remote sensing, urban studies, other subfields in geography). Over 300 volunteers made contributions to our project. Currently, there are over 10,000 followers in our community.
Though the project was created for Chinese GIS students at the beginning, we later expanded it to global GIS students. We hope the project could promote global GIS education.
To date, we have summarized more than 400 GIS-related programs in more than 70 countries or regions across the world. More information about the GIS programs are updated frequently on our website https://gisphere.github.io/ and Twitter @GISphereGuide.
Yuhao Kang - @YuhaoKang - yuhao.kang@wisc.edu
Yikang Wang - @ykangw - yikang.wang.21@ucl.ac.uk
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/gisphere/Choosing-GIS-graduate-programs
If you use this dataset in your research or applications, please cite this source:
Wang, Yikang, Yuhao Kang, Haokun Liu, Ce Hou, Bing Zhou, Shan Ye, Yuyan Liu et al. "Choosing GIS graduate programs from afar: Chinese students' perspectives." Transactions in GIS (2023). https://doi.org/10.1111/tgis.13037
@article{wang2023choosing,
title={Choosing GIS graduate programs from afar: Chinese students' perspectives},
author={Wang, Yikang and Kang, Yuhao and Liu, Haokun and Hou, Ce and Zhou, Bing and Ye, Shan and Liu, Yuyan and Rao, Jinmeng and Pei, Zhenghao and Ye, Xiang and others},
journal={Transactions in GIS},
volumn={27},
year={2023},
publisher={Wiley Online Library}
}