Modelling Student Flows in the Omani Higher Education System

Education has a major role in individuals life and society due to its influence in all aspects of life, whether social or economic. Education has become countries’ gateway to scientific progress and prosperity. Therefore, it has become necessary to plan education in order to ensure that its outcomes are properly directed towards developing societies with the latest scientific knowledge and development. Education can be seen as a sequence of stages, pre-school education, school education and higher education. Each stage of education is important in the ladder of cognitive development, as each stage leads to the next stage. Next comes after completing the higher education stage, joining the labour market, which is also available for school education graduates. Attention to planning higher education is a prerequisite to ensure that higher education graduates can easily join the labour market. There is no doubt that there are difficulties such as the incompatibility of the skills acquired in education with the skills required in the labour market, and the absence of an appropriate plan for admitting students in higher education and allocating them to different disciplines. The existence of such difficulties may impede the smooth transition of graduates from higher education to the labour market, which necessitates the importance of studying the characteristics of higher education students and the factors affecting their enrolment in the labour market. The application of the study to Oman was due to the results of previous graduate surveys (2010, 2015, and 2017), which showed that graduates of some disciplines struggle to find a job opportunity. The existence of a statistical system for higher education in Oman and the use of its data greatly helped in identifying the characteristics of students enrolled in the higher education system, which are linked later with the results of the analysis of graduate data surveys.