AI-driven Psychographic and Behavioral Segmentation of Prospective University Students in Vietnam

The digital transformation of higher education marketing demands more sophisticated approaches to understanding prospective students beyond traditional demographic segmentation. This study develops a machine learning-based psychographic and behavioral segmentation framework for prospective university students in Vietnam, integrating constructs from consumer choice theory and technology adoption literature. We employ established unsupervised and supervised machine learning techniques (k-means clustering, Gaussian Mixture Models, and XGBoost classification) rather than claiming novel artificial intelligence architectures. Analyzing survey data from 1,486 Grade-12 students, our hybrid methodological approach identified three distinct segments: Intrinsically-Motivated Digital Explorers (27.7%), Prestige-Driven Traditionalists (38.9%), and Undecided Ambivalents (33.4%). Supervised learning (XGBoost) achieved 87.2% accuracy in predicting segment membership, with feature importance analysis revealing intrinsic motivation, technology readiness, and risk aversion as the primary discriminators. The findings extend higher education consumer choice theory by integrating technology readiness as an independent discriminative factor and demonstrate the methodological value of combining unsupervised and supervised machine learning for market segmentation.