Segmenting University Students on the Basis of Their Expectations

ABSTRACT

It has been suggested that in the service sector there is a need to promote strategies devised to supply each market with what it really demands. It is particularly so in the education field, where competitiveness is increasing in intensity day by day. The design of such strategies requires taking as starting points the identification of the demands and the necessities of the market, along with the understanding of its differences. In this paper, we emphasize the utility of student expectations as subjective variables to identify the heterogeneity found in the context of Spanish private universities. After reviewing the different approaches to service quality expectations given in the literature, we advance some proposals as to the best way to evaluate such constructs. We also show how service quality expectations can be used to make an effective segmentation of the student group under research and to identify the essential attributes that establish the degree of perceived service quality in each segment.

KEYWORDS:

• Expectations
• segmentation
• service quality
• university students