Assessing Quality of Educational Service by the Servqual Model: Viewpoints of Hotel Management Undergraduate Students at Manipal University in India

Abstract

Considerations and thoughts on how students perceive or expect quality of educational services, contributes to a great deal in improving the quality of educational and academic services in Universities and Institutions across the world. Defining the probable gaps between the expectations and perceptions of students will enable educational service providers to embark on necessary actions to augment the quality of educational services provided by a university particularly offering a hospitality management degree. The aim of this study is to use the SERVQUAL instrument to measure and identify any actual or perceived gaps between student's expectations and perceptions of the educational services of their University. Particularly aimed at determining the quality gap in educational services provided to the Undergraduate Hotel Management students of the Manipal University - India in December 2013.The students participating in the study are pursuing a 4 year Bachelor Degree in Hotel Management. The study will also provide insights to the University on the improvements needed for future student satisfaction on educational services and quality improvements. The SERVQUAL metric was adapted for the measurement of service quality in the higher education of hotel management course at Manipal University and conducted on an entire population of students. The proposed instrument is tested only in one University in India with an entire population (170 students) of two years of study. This research paper presents an approach to using SERVQUAL for measuring student's expectations and perceptions. The adapted factors concerning student services at a University from the standard SERVQUAL instrument are questioned using the SERVQUAL methodology. The detailed statistical analysis reduced to meaningful statements are usable by the management of university's as an effective easy to apply quality measurement tool. The outcomes of the study resulted in a negative quality gap in all five dimensions of quality educational services: Tangible (physical environments) Reliability (trustworthiness) Responsiveness (Sensitivity) Assurance (guarantee) Empathy (Understanding). The maximum and minimum mean of quality gap observed was -0.48 in the dimension of Tangibles and -0.11 in the dimension of assurance respectively. It is significant to note that the perceptive gap of the female students were higher than the perceptive gap of the male students in all 5 dimensions. Female rated reliability with high mean and the male students rated tangibles with a high mean. It was also observed that the P value of female scores on the dimension off reliability 0.033 and responsive 0.031 and is statistically relevant as it is less than 0.05.