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University Staff, Image and Students' Satisfaction in Selected Regional Universities in Sri Lanka

2017; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

1556-5068

I.M.S. Weerasinghe, HH Dedunu,

Higher Education Governance and Development

A university is one of the best place for higher education where students get lot of opportunities to develop their career skills unlocking their personal potentials. Not like in the past, higher education system is now witnessing dramatic change with the opening of private universities. Resulting Sri Lankan state universities are threaten by private universities in and around the world. To gain competitive advantage it is essential to change existing university system considering stakeholder requirements. Students are a key strategic customer of a university, then satisfying students’ needs and expectation are vital for a university to be success in a competitive environment. Hence, this study is focusing to identify the impact of quality of academic staff, nonacademic staff and university image on students’ satisfaction at Rajarata, Wayamba, Ruhuna and Sabaragamuwa universities. Population of the study was all management undergraduates of above four universities and 532 respondents were selected as sample based on stratified sampling technique. Data was collected on self-administrated questionnaires and were analyzed through AMOS statistical software. The findings of the study indicated that quality of academic staff has both direct and indirect impact on students’ satisfaction through university image. However, only direct impact of non-academic staff on students’ satisfaction was significant in Sri Lankan context. University image works as mediating variable and improve the impact of quality of academic staff on students’ satisfaction.