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Top1. Introduction
The rapid growth of educational institutions leads to the fact that the students have the wide options to choose from and there is real competition among institutions for intake of students (Rajani Jain Sangeeta Sahney Gautam Sinha, 2013). Like the corporate academic institutions, also need to continuously innovate, diversify their structures and find new ways of delivering their services more effectively to their customers. Like many other commercial organizations if an education provider is to stand out in the mind of the consumer and obtain a sustainable competitive advantage, it must be concerned with not only return on investment and market share but also with understanding the customer satisfaction and perception of services. In order to attract customers, serve their needs and retain them, service providers and researchers are actively involved in understanding consumers’ expectations and perceptions of service quality. A better understanding of how customers form impressions of quality can provide valuable information to management for designing service delivery systems that enhance customer satisfaction and for adapting the institute environment to the customer’s needs2. The recent competitive environment for enrolling students has forced to adopt a ‘students as a customer’ approach to educational delivery. The university providers have progressively changed towards a customer orientation and accepted students as their most important customers. In India, the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) and National Board of Accreditation (NBA) have also included student experience as one the assessment criteria1. The study identifies the dominant factor amongst ‘Quality of Input’ provided by the institutes to the students and ‘Quality of Life’ experienced by the students in the institutes which will have an impact on the quality of higher education. This study support seven dimensions in higher education namely input quality, curriculum, academic facilities, industry interaction, interaction quality, support facilities, and non academic processes. The study made an attempt to measure the relative effectiveness of identified service quality factors on quality of higher education. The results can be used to develop a predictive model of the impact of service quality factors on the quality of higher education.
Economic liberalization is on, and opening up of the education sector, especially the higher education sector is inevitable. The globalization of knowledge and consequently education leaves no option for Indian higher educational institutes except for improving its quality. It is imperative that institutes of higher education monitor the quality of their services and commit to continuous improvements in an effort to respond to the needs of their customers2. The technical education sector in India today, is one of the fastest growing sector and has translated itself into the stature of an industry. Thus, the identifications of the dimensions, which signal quality and the achievement of excellence in higher education, have emerged in this decade as key issues facing academia. Thus, we can conclude that institutes of higher education get inputs viz., students, faculty and staff, and funds from the external environment. The users of these outputs are society in general and industry in particular (Rajani Jain Gautam Sinha Sangeeta Sahney, 2011).