An Analysis of Students Satisfaction in a Higher Education Context

Service organizations, including higher education providers, increasingly recognize that today's customers have many alternatives to chose from, that they may more readily change providers if not content, and that satisfaction largely depends on the quality of service provided. In the case of higher education institutions, this seems to be the case at the time when prospective students enroll or apply to several colleges to get admitted, during the break between semesters (when students transfer from a college to another) or at the end of program (when they can choose to continue or not their education within the same college). Over the last decade, a flurry of research on customer satisfaction and service quality has been produced and continues to do so at a very fast pace. Our paper builds on the extant literature organized around the SERVQUAL instrument and makes headway by focusing on the differences in perceived quality of students in different programs at the same business college. The hypothesis we aim at testing here is that satisfaction and, subsequently, the overall quality differ with the curriculum, instructional staff, and physical setting. Drawing on data collected via a survey of college graduates, our analysis strongly supports the hypothesis. Based on these results, we assess the strengths and weaknesses of each program and provide a set of managerial recommendations