Search results

The marketing concept is an idea that has been adopted in non‐marketing contexts, such as the relationships between universities and their students. This paper aims to posit that marketing metaphors are inappropriate to describe the student‐university relationship.

The authors provide a conceptual discussion of the topic.

The use of marketing metaphors appears sometimes to be indiscriminate and the appropriateness to use them in student‐university relationships is questioned in this article.

This notion of students as customers has caused a misinterpretation of the relationship between universities and students.

Students should not be viewed as customers of the university, but as citizens of the university community. The contention contained within this paper is that the customer metaphor is inappropriate to describe students' relationships to universities.

The use of marketing buzzwords does not contribute to a correct description or an accurate understanding of the student‐university relationship. On the contrary, misconceptions and misunderstandings flourish due to misleading terminology and contradictory vocabulary. These frameworks tend to be illusionary if used in non‐marketing contexts, such as universities.

Since universities adopted a “Student as Customer” approach, student consumer behavior is a field of study which has become crucial. In the European higher education area, more understanding is needed on International students, and more precisely on Erasmus students. The purpose of this paper is to validate a multidimensional scale to assess Erasmus students’ value expectations (i.e. expected value) on the basis of costs and benefits in their choices as consumers of an academic experience abroad.

A survey conducted on a sample of 192 students from 50 universities show the role of functional, social and emotional values along with costs of time and effort in the perceived value of an Erasmus experience.

After validating the five scales, the results show that social and emotional are the aspects were students’ expected value dimensions are the highest, as the Erasmus experience is expected to enrich their studies and enable them to boost their self-confidence, while functionally helping them to find a job in the future. Concerning the sacrifices, the Erasmus experience has a high cost with regard to effort, time and energy, but students are willing to go through it: an Erasmus stay is seen as a good investment, whose benefits will be reaped in the long run.

The contribution of this paper comes from the scope and the target: a multidimensional trade-off approach to the expected value of the Erasmus experience. Other works have already depicted the educational experience through the value concept, but none, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, has measured expected value on the pre-purchase phase for Erasmus students.

On the basis of the justice, attachment, social support, self-determination theories, this research paper examines the impact of the student–instructor relationship construct on the customer-centric measures of overall student satisfaction, and perceived value for money and their impact of the behavioral intentions as an endogenous construct. We considered universities as providers of complex services focusing on students' service quality and students as the customers of the higher education institutions.

A survey instrument was used to collect data among undergraduate and graduate business students in a medium-sized Canadian university (N = 178). Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to analyze the strength, significance, and effect sizes of the relationships between the key constructs.

The results indicate that the student–instructor relationship is significantly related to student satisfaction and value for money perceptions. Also, the student satisfaction and behavioral intentions, value for money and student satisfaction, and value for money and behavioral intentions relationship were significant.

The perceived quality of student–instructor relationship and its relationship to customer-centric measures like satisfaction, value for money and behavioral intentions has received relatively little attention in previous research and was discovered to be an important contributor to the perceived student satisfaction and value for money. The importance of the student–instructor relationship is further emphasized indirectly via the perceived value for money construct to student satisfaction.

The paper seeks to explore the influences of service quality in higher education and the perceptions associated with the implementation of a Singapore tertiary institution. It draws on the underpinnings of SERVQUAL, and discusses the dichotomy and interrelation between customer perception and expectation.

Qualitative methodology was employed and data were collected by means of structured in‐depth interviewing with both internal (18 academics and ten current students) and external samples (ten graduates and five industry representatives). Content analysis was utilized to examine three key aspects of service standards: customer orientation, course design/delivery, and support services.

The way students are perceived, whether as customers or products, will have an influence on the type of learning dynamics that develop both within and outside the classroom. Service quality, therefore, needs to be evaluated based on an integrated experience which occurs in a network of learning spaces created to promote dialogue, inquiry and reflection.

Management of student expectations is fundamental to ensuring appropriate service quality in higher education. Closer working relationship with industry partners should be encouraged to serve as an audit on curricula relevance. Long‐term quality of support services can be achieved by short‐term measures such as training staff to be student‐centered rather than task‐driven.

This paper is based on an actual framework developed by the engineering school as part of their strategic plan in achieving excellence in both quality of courses and learning experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to study Bayesian dependency modelling (BDM) to validate the model of educational experiences and the student-customer orientation questionnaire (SCOQ), and to identify the categories of educatonal experience in which students expect a higher educational institutions (HEI) to be student-customer oriented.

This paper employs a cross-sectional quantitative survey study, mixed methods research, exploratory factor analysis and BDM.

The validated model of educational experiences and the SCOQ; results indicate that students expect to be treated as customers in some, but not all categories of educational experience.

The authors contribute to existing literature on two fronts: the validated model of educational experiences and the categories of educational experience in which students expect to be treated as customers.

The validated SCOQ presented in the paper may be used by other HEIs to assess the degree to which students expect a particular HEI to be customer oriented. Also, HEIs should assess students’ expectations concerning student-customer orientation before employing such an approach.

The paper presents a validated model of educational experiences and a SCOQ. Additionally, the study does not investigate whether students expect a HEI as such to be student-customer oriented (as most studies have done so far); instead, the aim is to find out whether, in which categories of educational experience and to what extent students expect a HEI to be student-customer oriented. Thus, the study explores the phenomenon of student-customer orientation at a deeper level, i.e. separately at the level of educational experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to answer the basic research question “Do highly emotional intelligent teachers increase student’s satisfaction in the universities?”

The paper is a quantitative study using self-reporting questionnaires applied on 283 students and 10 faculty members.

The paper shows the importance of having high emotional intelligent teachers in the universities to increase students’ emotional intelligence (EI) and, therefore, their satisfaction. The results show that the primary factor that will increase the EI of students is not what most of the scholars mentioned, the EI of teacher, but the class interactions.

The paper makes a recommendation to universities to hire emotionally intelligent teachers who stress on increasing the EI of students. Universities, by increasing the EI of their students, will improve their business situation, since if students are happy they will remain in the universities, spending, therefore, more money and encouraging other students to do so.

No such research was previously conducted in Lebanon where still few people understand the meaning or the importance of EI. This study, therefore, is fulfilling a gap, a brick in the wall of knowledge on class interaction in bridging the link between teachers and students.

Service organizations are encouraged to consider the manner in which employees perform at the customer/front‐line employee interface, as a means to gain competitive advantage. The employee's behaviour requires “emotional labour” where the front‐line employee (academic), has to either conceal or manage actual feelings for the benefit of a successful service delivery. The implication is not necessarily of equality or mutual benefit, but of satisfaction for the customer (student) and profit for the management. The paper discusses whether the academic is being exploited in this three‐way relationship. To illustrate this argument, data gathered from in‐depth interviews at a higher education institution are used. The research is of value as an aid for the management and support of academic staff in an age of managerialism and to the notion of the student as customer.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the importance of service quality as a means of achieving long‐term competitive advantage in higher education. It further seeks to explore the influences of customer expectation, course design and delivery as well as learning support on service quality.

The paper presents the findings of a qualitative study conducted in a Singapore tertiary institution where in‐depth interviewing was employed and 12 academics were involved.

The study finds that perception of tertiary students as either customers or products will have a direct impact on the dynamics created within and outside a learning space. Quality service in higher education should aim at offering experiences that promote dialogue, inquiry and reflection in the long term.

Instructors should learn to balance the expectations of students without compromising on academic rigor. Curricula should be kept updated by consulting industry and economic trends. Learning support should be complemented by being student‐centered rather than merely task‐driven.

The strategic framework utilized by the Singapore institution has proven to be useful in achieving different aspects of service quality. It provides a starting model for a variety of contexts and paradigms to be built on.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and interpret the critical quality attributes of core educational services at the course level both with student and lecturer involvement. Significant differences between the viewpoints of these two directly involved stakeholder groups are also demonstrated to provide a better understanding of student expectations.

Students of quality management courses were invited to collect those attributes that could have an impact on their perceived educational service quality. The compiled list of 23 characteristics has been formed on the basis of a four-point Likert scale-based questionnaire. With approximately 360 responses, thorough statistical analyses have been executed to investigate whether any significant differences could be detected between the quality attributes perceived by the different student segments. A group of lecturers has also been invited to fulfil the same questionnaire to compare their viewpoints with those of the students.

The results allow us to identify critical quality attributes which may be used in all platforms and interactions with students. The conclusions can be implemented on the course level to adjust the plan-do-check-act-based improvement of courses in which lecturers are directly interested.

As the new generation of students increasingly regard themselves as customers, they have become more aware of how they are taught and how they participate in the learning process. Institutionalizing this approach may contribute to the shaping of the organizational quality culture by emphasizing student focus and may result in the identification of best practices and standardization of processes at the course level.