Graduate Scholarship Supportive Policies Influencing Curriculum Management of Master Program in Environmental and Water Resources Engineering (International Program), Mahidol University

Abstract

Graduate scholarship supportive policies is one of the program management strategies that helps the graduate program analyze and create the strategic plan in the curriculum management more efficiently. Supporting scholarship to students has attracted their study interest and has increased the number of students in the admission process each year. In addition, it has brought the best-qualified students with high academic performance to study in the program. It leads to this study that aims to examine the strength of providing scholarship and its relation to the number of students and graduation periods. This study collected sample data of 76 Thai and foreign students enrolled during academic year 2010-2018 in master program in Environmental and Water Resources Engineering (International Program) from the database system provided by the Faculty of Graduate Studies, Mahidol University. Number of students and gradation periods with scholarship and without scholarship were then analyzed. Two main types of scholarship; (1) Norwaygian Government Scholarship Program : Capacity Building for Institute in Myanmar (CBIM) and (2) Mahidol University Postgraduate Scholarship (MUPostGrad) were considered and referred in this study. The results show that providing CBIM scholarship is not correlated with an increase in number of students admitted due to the limits of the number of scholarship and only providing for Myanmar students. However, providing MUPostGrad scholarship strongly influences the increasing number of students admitted during 2017-2019 of 2.46 times. This is because the criteria in supporting scholarship to applicants is mainly based upon their qualifications. Moreover, the result indicates that graduation periods taken by masters graduates who receive 2 types of scholarship; are shorter. The graduates who get support from CBIM scholarship spend 2-2.5 years to complete program study and take 2.5-3.0 years for the graduates who receive MUPostGrad scholarship.