Key drivers that impact the quality of education – a holistic approach

Purpose - The education sector acts as an input for every other sector and contributes around 7% to the service industry; hence, it is important to identify, measure and analyze the drivers that impact the delivered service quality. Design/methodology/approach - This paper used different approaches to identify measure and analyze the drivers that impact the service quality. In addition to a thorough literature review, qualitative tools like brainstorming, the focused group technique, and the survey technique have been used. Decision-making tools like the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), and a quantitative tool, one-samplet-test, with the help of MINITAB software, were used to analyze the inputs received from 179 experts. By using the stated approach, the planned research outcomes have been achieved. Findings - Quality of teachers, quality of students, quality of policies, and quality of facilities have been identified as the key drivers that impact quality of education. The paper highlights that the people quality drivers play a significantly important role in the quality of education when compared to the quality of non-people drivers. From the statistical analysis of the hypotheses, it was inferred that the People quality consisting of the quality of a teacher and the quality of students are the two prominent drivers to the Quality of education. This paper demonstrates the importance of the quality of a teacher and its significance to the quality of education. The recommendations made might be considered for the implementation, which can improve the quality of education in the country. Research limitations/implications - This paper is focused on the data collected from the experts in the top-ranked management institutes only. The data from the experts from undergraduate institutions and other management institutes could have added more value. Practical implications - In the paper, the drivers were identified and further analyzed to suggest that teacher quality is a dominant driver of education quality. The findings also suggest that there should be a high focus on having a great quality teacher as compared to the facilities. The weights identified will enable the researcher to arrive at the overall quality scores of any Institute. As a part of the process, the user just needs to collect the ratings from the end customers (the parents of the students) against each driver, and the institute level scores can be derived. These scores can then be used by the Institute's management to analyze the results and improve upon the weak areas to improve the delivered service quality in the education sector. Originality/value - A holistic approach to exploring major drivers that impact the quality of education is a new approach. Moreover, using different tools like AHP, hypothesis testing,t-test, using the coefficient of variation in a single paper has not been attempted before. The revalidations of accepted hypotheses with respondents is also a new approach.