International Cooperative Education and Career Path Preparation Program for Undergraduate Students

Abstract

Internationalization has become a trend in the society and education. Thus, the
higher education institutions are required to produce more internationally skillful
bachelor’s degree graduates. The International Cooperative Education Program
(ICEP) and Career Path (CP) became some of the means to prepare undergraduate
students of the international skills. This mixed method research used a five-point
Likert scale questionnaire (IOC from 0.50-1.00) for collecting data from 25
participants and structured interview form for collecting data from three key
informants of Mahapajabati Buddhist College (MBC) in Thailand. The purposes of
this study were to provide the effective approaches of ICEP and CP for MBC and
to create students’ future plan of ICEP and CP. The findings showed that the
effective approaches of ICEP and CP should be a crucial policy and important
mission of MBC graduate production as well as ICEP and CP should be implied
continually from the first year of learning until graduating. In addition, five
categories, namely, (a) self-actualization approaches (b) future goals setting (c)
interested careers (d) interested international workplaces and (e) future necessary
skills preparation could be applied as effective means for students’ future plan of
ICEP and CP.