Higher education quality assessment using SERVQUAL

Every technical educational institute (TEI) evaluates and improves its performance as a routine. These evaluations and improvements are solely concentrated towards the improvement of their ranking among their peer institutes rather than being towards knowing what level of service students expect from them. This study examines and evaluates the applicability of the SERVQUAL instrument in verifying whether the institute meets the student expectation at a premium technical education institute in south India. A questionnaire is developed inheriting SERVQUAL dimension and items with a few changes to better suit in the context of higher education. The Student undergoing their third and final year of their graduation are the respondent. The study indicates that the TEI did not meet the expectation of students. The gap analysis between service perception and expectation has been carried out, and the results show that in all the five service quality dimensions (tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, empathy, and assurance), perceptions scores were lower than the expectations scores with tangibles having the highest gap scores out of all the five and reliability the lowest. The results indicate that there are a lot of service improvements that need to be implemented to enhance the provided service quality in order to gain a competitive advantage.