A Critical Analysis of Student Satisfaction
By Engr. Haris Zikrur Rehman
Assistant Professor, PEB Coordinator and Deputy Director Professional Development Centre (PDC)
Electrical Engineering Department, DHA SUFFA UNIVERSITY, KARACHI
Education is one of the key building aspects of society. It helps in promoting the values of understanding and thus developing and shaping the ideas that can benefit human nature. For human development, education is very necessary. Education is about much more than the appearance of symptoms. Education delivers the knowledge that one needs to stay afloat in today’s society. Thus by virtue of Education creativity and conceptuality are being pushed.
Elaborating the importance of education in our society, school, colleges, and universities are been built. The reason for making these institutions is to deliver education is to incorporate today’s requirements and to deliver the concept of a better life in a society. These are some of the values that education delivers into society. Like all other educational institutions, universities provide education to an individual, so that the student can apply the concepts learned in a university practically at a workplace. Therefore, a university can be termed as a last resort for a student where he can learn all the aspects of he/she will be encountering professionally. As all other organizations have developed a knack of materialistic approach, education cannot afford to develop that strategy. Since education’s main idea and the theme is for the betterment of society, therefore, affixing any materialized goals with the educational output will distort the basic aim.
The competitive world in today’s scenario is viewed as a service industry and manufacture industry. As far as the education sector is concerned, it is termed as the service sector but associating the word industry with education makes its vision vague. As education cannot be materialized, therefore any effort in marketing of an educational intuition will differ from the conventional style of marketing. One way of differing from the conventional style is that the faculty teaching at HEI has got customer-based brand equity (CBBE) of his own which plays a pivotal role in expanding the market share and to enhance the brand image. Faculty members with CBBE influence the decision-making process of a current and prospective student.
Brand characteristics of a faculty member include classroom instruction quality, level of competence, knowledge in the field and the market reputation. These factors influence substantially in the mind of a student. The CBBE is in direct relationship with the student’s feelings of attachment thus making the bond between the professor brand and the student is stronger than before therefore contributing to the brand image of HEI.
As the private institute has no social responsibilities over them, therefore, educationists in private sector consider the student as a customer in a materialistic approach that has been under question. As the only motive that remains is the expansion of business through profit that they earned. For this very reason the term ‘Student Satisfaction’ is mistakenly interchanged with the ‘Customer is always right’ phrase. Customer focus is pivotal in the TQM model for leadership and this has led many services and manufacture industries to success have been perceived wrongly in the education sector. Therefore need for developing a concept is required which doesn’t incorporate students as customers. For HEI, customers are those which incorporate students (products of HEIs) therefore, HEIs should focus on developing stringent QA (transparent processes of timely evaluation during a semester) and QC (Only those should pass who are believed to deliver a better customer satisfaction in the Job marker) procedures.
Student satisfaction is the key element in enhancing the brand image of the HEI. To retain students and to attract prospective students HEIs must indulge themselves in an activity that generates larger and positive student satisfaction. HEI culture and climate play a critical role in student satisfaction. These factors determined the overall efficiency of the student which in thus help in creating the educational satisfaction of a student in HEI.
The time has changed and there is an increase in competition. A student has more choices than they can select numerous HEI for just one technology or discipline they are planning to study. Therefore the need for a comprehensive, well-coordinated and elaborative marketing strategy with positive student satisfaction is required to attract the desired number of prospective students.
