Modelling and Managing Student Loyalty: A Study of a Norwegian University College

Abstract

Higher education institutions are becoming increasingly businesslike, a shift that is transforming student loyalty into an important strategic theme for universities and colleges. This paper reports a “cross‐over” study that uses well‐known theories from service marketing in a new context, that of educational services addressing customer perspectives on the student role. The study draws on recent research on National Customer Satisfaction Index models, with loyalty as the ultimate dependent variable. The role of affects is embedded in the model, which also includes student satisfaction and students’ perceptions of the school’s reputation, as well as cognitive quality drivers. Three important findings are reported. First, the main results are in compliance with findings in the general literature on service marketing, strengthening the robustness of this modelling framework. Second, affects seem to be important mediators of quality drivers on satisfaction, and thus indirectly on student loyalty. Third, learning quality is the cognitive antecedent that by far has most influence on loyalty.

Keywords:

• affects
• reputation
• student loyalty
• student satisfaction