Impact of Service Quality on Student Retention: A Study on Private Educational Institutes of Pakistan

Abstract

With increased number of educational institutes and growth in service sector, students and their parents are seeking those institutes that will provide them quality education and experience that they will remember throughout their life. A current student is a customer who is seeking an education that will help him/her in developing news skills and prepare him for the future. As we know that educational institutes develop their budget upon the projected enrolments of the students and it has become very crucial and important for the institutes to retain those students. This situation led to the need of detail study and research in area of service quality and student retention on how schools can know whether their students are satisfied with the provided services and how schools can improve them and can retain their students. A decrease in number of students, decreases the student retention rate and thus decreases the overall budgeted funds of the institute necessary to operate and grow. The purpose of this research is to add additional contribution on body of work on service quality and student retention in context of Pakistan Educational landscape. This study shows the relationship between service quality dimensions like Tangibility, Reliability, Responsiveness, Assurance and Empathy and student retention. Here student retention is related to student satisfaction thus we can say that students will retain more when they are satisfied with services provided by the school. The research focus on to search the answer of the questions: What makes students satisfied and they remain in the same school for number of years? How the schools can retain their outgoing students to increase their enrollment? And What are the student expecting from school and how they become satisfied from those expectations? The results obtained through this research shows significant relationship between service quality dimensions and student satisfaction that will help schools to predict and assess student retention which in return helps in understanding the overall service and the quality of the school