Student Satisfaction, an Overview of Educational Services Quality- The Case of Bucharest University of Economic Studies

The main goal of this manuscript is to provide an assessment of the educational services quality by measuring the BUES student satisfaction. Though the starting point is represented by the classical models of quality evaluation that have been applied in various sectors (e.g. SERVQUAL, SERVPERF) or were designed especially for the education field (e.g. HETQMEX, HEdPERF), this study offers a new perspective of the main dimensions of the higher-education service quality. Therefore, the paper brings in the concept of quality of services measured by an aggregated index which includes three main components: the quality of basic services (teaching), the quality of auxiliary services (secretary, library, administrative operations) and the quality of supplementary services (eatery, dorms, online services). The index aggregates the previously mentioned three components using a 50%, 30%, 20% weighting framework, constructed taking in consideration their general importance. The proposed index is computed for a (non-probabilistic) sample of 139 students which answered an online questionnaire indicating their satisfaction regarding several aspects included in the three groups of services. The main results of the paper indicate that the students enrolled in BUES have an average satisfaction level of 3.4 (on a scale from 1 to 5) and that the lowest 25% have a satisfaction level under 2.9 and the top 25% have a satisfaction over 4.0. Taking in consideration the three aggregated components we found that the highest satisfaction (average score of 3.6) is assigned to the auxiliary services and the lowest is assigned to the supplementary services, with an average score of 2.9.