Determinants of modern management of private vocational colleges: A structural equation model

The study was focused on finding ways to manage Thailand's private vocational colleges so that they might both survive and thrive under a highly competitive environment. Currently, vocational education in Thailand is a highly competitive business enterprise with competition coming from government schools, international schools and other private sector schools which accounts for almost 37% of t he total educational system. The researchers therefore undertook the development and validation of t he effective management construct using confirmatory factor analysis of strategic management and innovation management on Thai private vocational colleges. A multi-stage random sampling was used to collect the sample from 614 Thai college administrators. The questionnaire was employed as the instrument for data collecting and PLS Graph was used for model verification. Results illustrated from the Structural Equation Modeling that confirmatory factors of innovation management and strategic management had both a direct and indirect effect on administrator effective management. Trained industrial staffs are now in short supply and this will only be exacerbated with the upcoming 2015 integration of 10 Southeast Asia nations. It is therefore, paramount that vocational institutions, both private and public, develop strategic vision, implement technological innovation such as 'flipped classrooms' while simultaneously developing efficient and effective communication channels with industry and state agencies that better serves the nearly 1 million Thai vocational school students.