The Impact of Resource Input Model of Education Quality On the Overall Students' Perceived Service Quality/L'impact Du Modèle D'entrée de Ressources de La Qualité de L'éducation Sur La Qualité de L'ensemble Des Services Perçue Par Les Étudiants

Summary

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Students' retention and their academic performance are influenced by the service quality provided by higher education institutions (Sander, Stevenson, King and Coates, 2000). As such, it is vital to identify the determinants of the overall students' perceived service quality. The aim of this research is to evaluate and validate the determinants of the overall students' perceived service quality in a private higher education institution in Malaysia, based on the combination of both the 'inside-out' and 'outside-in' approaches as well as the resource input model of education quality. A total of 458 undergraduate business students from a private university in Malaysia participated in this research. The findings revealed that contact personnel, access to facilities, cost of courses offered, physical facilities of the tertiary institution and resource input model of education quality were positively related to the overall students' perceived service quality.

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The Impact of Resource Input Model of Education Quality On the Overall Students' Perceived Service Quality/L'impact Du Modèle D'entrée de Ressources de La Qualité de L'éducation Sur La Qualité de L'ensemble Des Services Perçue Par Les Étudiants

1. INTRODUCTION

Service quality has become an important area in services marketing literature due to its effect on cost, profitability, customer satisfaction, and customer retention (Buzzell & Gale, cited in Buttle, 1996; Bolton & Drew, 1991; Reichheld & Sasser, 1990). Intensive competition in the higher education sector (Ford, Joseph and Joseph, 1999), internationalization of higher education (Marzo-Navarro, Pedraja-Iglesias and Rivera-Torres, 2005), higher expectation towards higher education institutions (Marzo-Navarro, et. al., 2005), increase offrili fee payment students (Oldfield and Baron, 2000), and the classification of education as a marketable service (Cuthbert, 1996; Mazarrol, 1998) prompted the management of the various higher education institutions to pay more attention in assessing the overall students' perceived service quality. The ability to meet customer-perceived service quality will affect the sustainability of an organization (Canic and McCarthy, 2000). Due to the important role that students' perceived service quality has in determining the sustainability of private higher education institutions in Malaysia, there is a need to identify what are the determinants for the overall students' perceived service quality.

In Malaysia, higher education institutions comprise of both public and private higher education providers. Eighteen publicly funded higher education institutions have been set up by the government to provide tertiary education opportunities to the nation (Ministry of Higher Education, 2006). In the privately-funded higher educational sector, a total of 22 private universities and university colleges, 4 foreign university branch campuses and 532 private colleges competed aggressively to enroll 341,310 Malaysian and foreign students in their various programs in 2005 (Education Guide Malaysia, 2006).

Owing to the As...

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