Student as Customer: Factors Affecting Satisfaction and Assessments of Institutional Quality

ABSTRACT

The present research examined relationships between satisfaction and quality judgments of college services. Students (N = 736) completed a questionnaire (SERVQUAL) to investigate perceived service performance of a university college. At the same time, they were asked about satisfaction with specific aspects of the program offered by the college. Three dependent measures of satisfaction were used: global satisfaction, willingness to recommend the college, and satisfaction with value received from the educational experience. Results indicated that the perceived quality of the educational offering and service quality explained different amounts of the variance in satisfaction. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the relative importance of actual and augmented product characteristics in explaining satisfaction.