Developing a decomposed alumni satisfaction model for higher education institutions

Abstract

The mission of higher education is both to transfer knowledge to students and to emphasise the students' total development. Higher education institutions can accomplish this mission by collecting information on student satisfaction, because understanding the students' perspectives can provide valuable information to management for allocating resources to better design education programmes. Although some attempts to quantify student satisfaction have been made through student questionnaires, these tend to be quite crude and ad hoc. As there is competitive pressure to provide quality education, this study aims to explore the determinants of alumni satisfaction in higher education. Although there is no alumni satisfaction model, the use of the customer satisfaction index (CSI) is unanimously acknowledged. The CSI provides a common set of measures to interpret customer satisfaction. Although CSI models can measure customer satisfaction, they lack the ability to diagnose areas for improvement. To address this issue, in this study we suggested a decomposed alumni satisfaction model. Decomposed models provide greater explanatory strength than pure models. Based on the results, we built several strategic management maps to help the department of a higher education institution identify areas for continuous improvement. The results showed that course design needs the most attention. Based on this result, the department took several measures to improve the quality of course design. The second survey showed that the improvement was significant, with the score for course design having the greatest improvement.

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