Content area
Full text
Introduction
Background to the study
Recently, the private education landscape in Singapore has expanded and evolved significantly. The number of international students enroled in private education institutions in Singapore has increased considerably from 9,000 in 1997 to 75,000 in 2014 (733 per cent increase) (Davies, 2014). Despite such growth in the number of international students, academic and service standards differ considerably within the higher education sector. Several studies have focused on different aspects of the public education sector in Singapore (Nguon, 2012); however, there has been insufficient academic research on the private education sector in Singapore, despite the Private Education Act being introduced in 2009. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining the relationships between service quality, student satisfaction, and student behavioural intentions in Singapore’s private tertiary educational institutes (PTEIs).
One area in the service literature that has received considerable attention is the conceptualisation of service quality (Parasuraman et al., 1985, 1988, 1991, 1994; Zeithaml et al., 1993, 1996; Spathis et al., 2004; Keiningham et al., 2007; Gruber et al., 2009; Chenet et al., 2010; Rood and Dziadkowiec, 2013; Aflaki and Popescu, 2014; Santos et al., 2015). In education, “service quality” is usually referred to as the non-academic aspects of students’ experience within an institution. It includes important institutional functions ranging from course administration, and student welfare, to campus catering (Giannakisa and Bullivantb, 2016). Greatrix (2011) identified several other non-academic services including academic advice and counselling, career support, student welfare, accommodations, and finance advice. Although the important role of expectations and perceptions in students’ evaluations of such services has been acknowledged in much of the service quality literature, there is an absence of such work in the private educational context in Singapore.
Justification and significance of the study
Watson et al. (2015) argued that it often takes some time to build loyalty and make a profit from new customers, with resultant customer replacement costs being very high. In light of this, two thoughts justified this study: customer satisfaction alone does not build customer retention or customer lifetime value (Keiningham et al., 2007), and service quality and customer satisfaction are closely linked to customer retention and market share (Dong et al., 2015). The results will...