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Abstract
College reputation depends on high student satisfaction to a certain degree, which makes the study of student satisfaction measurement so necessary. The current literature is divided into two areas. The first measures the one-way interaction between student attributes and their level of satisfaction. The second area utilizes gap analysis to illustrate the difference between student satisfaction and level of importance. In this research, we explore how the various randomly combined personal attributes of students influence the corresponding satisfaction level. A student satisfaction survey was made to collect empirical data and a factorial experiment was designed to further analyze the interactions among different student attributes as well as the main effects on overall satisfaction level. These results can guide managerial decisions regarding the actions a college should take to effectively improve the quality of college services and thus improve retention levels.
Keywords
College student satisfaction, student attribute, interaction, factorial experiment design
1. Introduction
In today's competitive environment, more and more service organizations are recognizing that their continued revenues are guaranteed by meeting changing and increasing customer demands. To increase market share, businesses try their best to study customer needs to satisfy or even exceed customer expectations [1]. Education, as a prototypical service organization, also needs enough revenues to support the daily operation through providing college services. The special point that differentiates education with other service organizations is that the main customers for education industry are students. For some higher educational institutions that rely on student tuitions as a primary source of revenue, it is quite necessary to recruit new students and keep a high retention level. Students base their continued enrollment at higher education institutions on how well the provided college services can satisfy them. In most cases, when students feel dissatisfied about some of the college services, they may choose to drop out or transfer to other universities [2]. This explains the importance of measuring student satisfaction as well as how to improve the quality of college service.
Knowing the necessity of measuring student satisfaction, a group of researchers started exploring the measuring tools. SERVQUAL [3] is absolutely one of the widely used ones [4-6], which measures the gap between customer's perceived performance and expectation to see how satisfied the customers feel. However,...