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Higher education marketing
Edited by Jane Hemsley-Brown and Anthony Lowrie
Theoretical background
Customer satisfaction
In a competitive marketplace, where organisations vie for customers, client satisfaction becomes an important differentiator of marketing strategy. Customer satisfaction largely depends on the degree to which a product supplied by an organisation meets or surpasses customer expectation. By measuring customer satisfaction, organisations are able to get an indication of how successful they actually are in providing products to the market.
Customer satisfaction is an abstract and rather ambiguous concept. Manifestations of satisfaction vary from one person to another and from one product to another. The state of the so-called "satisfaction" depends on a number of psychological and physical variables, and correlates with certain behaviours. Among the psychological variables, personal beliefs, attitudes and evaluations may affect customer satisfaction ([1] Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980). In the context of the present paper, attitudes towards the quality of higher education are believed to influence individual satisfaction. According to [15] Oliver (1981), customer satisfaction is relatively transient and is consumption-specific, whereas attitudes are relatively enduring. Along these lines, [21] Westbrook and Oliver (1981) argued that satisfaction is an evaluation of the totality of the purchase situation relative to expectations, whereas an attitude is a liking for a product or service that lacks the element of comparison. Therefore, it appears from this perspective that the level of satisfaction may vary depending on the alternatives available to customers.
For the purpose of the present research, student satisfaction is defined as an evaluative summary of direct educational experience, based on the discrepancy between prior expectation and the performance perceived after passing through the educational cycle. Because satisfaction is a psychological state, the efforts of measuring it are oftentimes ridden with caveats. Yet, despite this, a large number of satisfaction measurements have been proposed.
Quality dimensions in higher education
Nowadays, higher education is being driven towards commercial competition imposed by economic forces resulting from the development of global education markets and the reduction of governmental funds, forcing colleges and universities to seek other sources of financing. Higher education institutions have to be concerned with not only what society values in terms of the skills and abilities of their graduates ([11] Ginsberg, 1991), but also with how their students feel...