Service Quality in Australian Higher Education Sector

Over the past few decades there has been a perceptible continual progression of the service sector around the globe. Consequently, service industries are playing an increasingly important role in the economy of many nations (Abdullah, 2006a). In a world where the service sector is becoming the driving force of the economy, quality of the service has become paramount important for the service based organizations to cope with the intense rivalry. Unlike the quality of the product the assessing the service quality is a complex phenomenon due to the salient attributes of the service. Since 1970 service industry has been widely researched agenda drawing much of the researchers’ attention to the service quality models (Pena, et al., 2013).

However, until recent past the education service has not attracted much attention in the service quality research forum. With the education liberalization and international student mobility, education service industry becoming a major contributor to most of the economies. Nowadays, higher education is being driven towards commercial competition imposed by economic forces resulting from the development of global education markets and the reduction of government funds that forces tertiary institutions to seek other financial sources (Abdullah, 2006a). In the current information era, where the countries are moving towards a knowledge based economies, education service plays a vital role and it is ever growing.

According to UNESCO Institute for Statistics, global tertiary enrolments reached 170 million in 2009 and as per European Statistics 2015, in European Union alone there are 19.5 million student population in the tertiary education. As per UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 60 per cent of total international tertiary students is concentrated in the US, UK, Australia, France, Germany, Russia, Japan and Canada. It was projected that Australia will report the highest growth in the inbound international student mobility. Further Australia is forecast to lead the way with growth of inbound mobile students from the more than 50 shortlisted countries, followed by the UK, US and Canada (Beall, 2012). With the growing demand and the expansion in the higher education industry in Australia, the quality of the service provided by the higher education institutes play a major role in continuing the growth momentum and  to remain a major contribute to the development of the Australian economy.

Australian Higher Education Sector

The service sector total employment counts to eighty percent across all sectors and tertiary education is the standard for forty per cent of people in the total labour force (The Australian Trade and Investment Commission, 2017). Not only the local labour market created demand for the higher education in Australia, the international students crossing borders for higher education attracted to the country for higher education. As per The Australian Trade and Investment Commission statistics Australia is the third most popular destination for the students and according to The Academic Ranking of World Universities Australia has become the sixth highest ranked country in the ranking of the world’s top 200 universities in the year 2017. The global presence of Australian higher education sector has created intense competition within the country and outside its borders as well.

Based on Australian government statistics in 2014 there are 1.3 million students enrolled in 43 accredited universities, colleges and Technical And Further Education (TAFE)s. During the recent past there has been a change in the sector with the changes made to the public policies. Some of the noteworthy changes such as the transformation of colleges and advance technology in to universities; opening of the domestic market to international students; government grants cut downs; and full fee paying domestic students have led to a greater competition whining the industry and more customer orientation. Alongside the rivalry intense competition, the quality of the service provided by higher education institutes became important not only to satisfy the customers (i.e., students and potential employers) but also the regulatory and quality assurance agencies.  ‘Considerable efforts are expended within Australian universities on improving service delivery to their students as a means of enhancing performance’ (Brown, 2006, p. 3). Over the past couple of years there has been numerous changes to the delivery of lectures to cater to the diverse needs of the students.

On campus study mode is the most popular mode of study among others being offshore distance learning, online learning and blended learning. However, foreign partnerships have recently given more opportunities for the sector to the tap the students who do not wish to cross boarders for learning. There are nearly one fourth of all Australian university campuses are located outside Australia (Beall, 2012). Now the students have much more study options than ever before as the boundaries are lifted and this will continue to evolve and gives greater opportunities for the students. This in this dynamic higher education sector the higher education institutes strives to strike a balance between the service quality and price.

Service Quality

Until 1970s service marketing did not transpire as a separate agenda in the research forum. However, from 1980s service quality has gained its momentum in the research agenda (Khodayari, 2011) and been viewed as a key driver in competitive advantage which could generate repeat sales, positive word-of-mouth feedback, customer loyalty and competitive product differentiation, thus, service quality has been linked with enhanced profitability (Abdullah, 2006a). Unlike products, services in nature are more complex concept due to its attributes of intangibility, inseparability and subjectivity. Thus the elusive nature of service quality construct, rendering it extremely difficult to define and measure (Abdullah, 2006a).

The most important aspect of service quality is that from whose point of view the quality should be measured. There are many areas of disagreement in the debate over how to measure service quality, and recent research has raised many questions over the principles on which the existing instruments are founded (Abdullah, 2006a; Abdullah, 2006b). In most of the instances the customer has been targeted as the principal agent of assessing the service quality. Undoubtable, satisfy the customer, the service provider should be able to match customers’ desired outcome. Further it should be noted that satisfaction do not coincide with the service quality rather the quality is an antecedent to satisfaction (Cronin & Taylor, 1992). Dated back to 1984, Gronroos was one of the first researchers who studied service quality exclusively, where he viewed service quality is comprised of two dimensions: technical quality and functional quality (Çerri, 2012). On the other hand Lewis and Booms (1983) service quality is a measure of how well the service level delivered matches customers’ expectations. Much of the literature is aimed at perceiving service quality in the customers’ standpoint.

There has been number of attempts to measure the service quality despite its complex and ambiguity nature. In the last decade, the emergence of diverse instruments of measurement such as SERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al., 1988), SERVPERF (Cronin and Taylor, 1992) and evaluated performance (EP) (Teas, 1993a, b) has contributed enormously to the development in the study of service quality (Abdullah, 2006a). In this quest in mid and late 1980s Parasuraman et al were one of the pioneering academics to measure the service quality as a difference between the expectation and performance. They initially devised a multi-faceted scale of measurement that comprises ten dimensions namely, reliability, responsiveness, competence, access, courtesy, communication, credibility, security, understanding/knowing the customer, and tangibles. In a subsequent effort, in 1988 they developed an instrument termed SERVQUAL by reducing these ten dimensions to five which includes Tangibles, Reliability, Responsiveness, Assurance, Empathy.

The below table summerises the service quality models developed and the industries that could be applied to;

 Table 1.1 Scales developed to measure service quality

Author(year)	Scale Developed	Industry
Parasuraman et al (1988) Knutson et al (1991) Cronin and Taylor (1992) Getty and Thompson (1994) Dabholkar et al. (1996) Evangelos Christou and Athina Nella (1999) Donald J. Shemwell and Ugur Yavas (1999) Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Malhotra ( 2005) (Firdaus, 2006a) Evangelos Tsoukatos, Evmorfia Mastrojianni (2010)	SERVQUAL LODGSERV SERPERF LODGQUAL RSQS Retail SQ WINE SQ Hospitals ES-QUAL HEdPERF BANQUAL-R metric	General Hospitality General Hospitality Retail Wineries Hospitals Online shopping Higher Education Banking

Source - (Randheer, 2015, p. 29)

SERVQUAL

Parasuraman SERVQUAL model adopted the notion that the perceived service quality (Q) which transpires from the comparison of expected quality (E) where the customer’s anticipated quality prior to the service being consumed, with the perceived (P) service quality which is realised  during the service consumption. If service expectations are confirmed during consumption, i.e. the service performance is up to what was anticipated, the quality of service is considered positive and vice versa (Çerri, 2012). Consequently, the SERVQUAL model has 2 separate sets of statements addressing the expectation and perception and could be denoted as; service quality Q = P – E.

The most famous tried and tested service quality measurement model across different industries is the SERVQUAL. The below table illustrates the studies carried out in different industry settings using the SERVQUAL model.

Table 1.2 Studies on service quality using SERVQUAL model

Service Industry	Author(s)/year
Auto repair	Bouman and Van der Wiele, 1992
Banking	Angur et al., 1999; Avkiran, 1999, Lassar et al., 2000; Newman, 2001
Education	Kwan and Ng, 1999; Oldfield and Baron, 2000; Shekarchizadeh et al., 2011
Healthcare	Andaleeb, 1998; Babakus and Mangold, 1992; Wong, 2002
Professional services	Hoxley, 2000; Philip and Hazlett, 2001
Public services	Carman, 1990; Brysland and Curry, 2001; Donelly et al., 2006; Wisniewski, 2001
Retailing	Finn and Lamb, 1991; Mehta et al., 2000
Telecommunication	Lai et al., 2007; Van der Wal et al., 2002
Transportation and shipping	Frost and Kumar, 2001; Sultan and Merlin, 2000

Source - (Çerri, 2012, p. 666)

Despite the popularity of SERVQUAL model, a number of criticisms was directed at SERVQUAL, aimed at both the conceptual and the operational level (Abdullah, 2006b). Most notable criticism is that SERVQUAL scale is based on the satisfaction paradigm rather than an attitude model (Abdullah, 2006a; Abdullah, 2006b; Cronin and Taylor, 1992). Cronin and Taylor (1992) suggest that the SERVQUAL approach do not adequately conceptualise and operationalise the service quality as it disregards the quality as an attitude and developed a model called SERVPERF, incorporating performance. They further argued SERVQUAL scale is measuring neither service quality nor consumer satisfaction as it is a disconfirmation-based model.

There seems to be a broad consensus that service quality is an attitude of overall judgement about service superiority, although the exact nature of this attitude is still hazy (Abdullah, 2006a; Abdullah, 2006b). Whilst its impact in the service quality domain is undeniable, SERVPERF being a generic measure of service quality may not be a totally adequate instrument by which to assess the perceived quality in higher education (Abdullah, 2006a). Thus it gives rise to a need for developing a model for the education industry.

Service Quality in Higher Education

Crosby (1979) defined the quality in education as conformance of education output to planned goals, specifications and requirements’. Given the attributes of education industry the service rendered by a higher education is quite complex due to the length of the process and variety of variables affecting it (Çerri, 2012) than the other industries such as bank, restaurant or telephone users. SERVQUAL model continued to be a ground breaking approach for the measure of service quality across multiple industries including the higher education (Karavasilis, et al., 2016) although it attracted much criticism. The ten dimensional SERVQUAL approach is initially attractive and seems to fit well with the requirements of an investigation into the quality of students’ experience in higher education, however the study suggested that the five dimensional SERVQUAL approach failed to measure the service quality in higher education (Sultan & Tarafder, 2007). As claimed by (Khodayari, 2011) the much of the studies in higher education service quality have focused on students’ view of quality, while little attention has been paid on the perspective of academic and administration staff.

Abdullah (2006) proposed a Higher Education Performance measurement called HEdPERF which mostly focuses on the administrative parts of the university and comparatively fewer emphasis on acdemic aspects (Sultan & Tarafder, 2007). In a study of comparing the suitability of a service quality measurement model using SERVPERF, modified SERVPERF and HEdPERF Abdullah (2006a) suggested that HEdPERF method resulted in more reliable estimations, (Karavasilis, et al., 2016), greater criterion and construct validity, greater explained variance, and consequently better fit than the other two instruments namely SERVPERF and HEdPERF-SERVPERF.

With the change of the delivery mode of higher education programs, there has been a greater trend towards switching from on campus studies to online study modes. The distance-learning students also tend to differ from campus-based students in a number of demographic characteristics, in particularly the age (Richardson, 2005). Unlike the on campus study mode the distance learning study gives rise to challenges to the higher education institutes due to ‘transactional distance’. In fact, most distance learning institutions use various kinds of personal support, such as face-to-face tutorials, residential schools and teleconferencing, to try to bridge the gap (Richardson, 2005). Thus, the perception of the quality of the service of distance learning students could be substantially different from on campus students.

Although a few of the studies focus on the distance education quality, they are not comprehensive in terms of proper item selection and model specification (Sultan & Tarafder, 2007). There has been number of studies conducted in Australia in relation to the service quality of higher education (Ong & Nankervis, 2012; Brown, 2006; Athiyaman, 1997). However, there has been a vacuum in the extant literature relating to the service quality measure of online courses offered by higher education institutes, especially in Australia.

References

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Richardson, J., 2005. Students’ perceptions of academic quality and approaches to studying in distance education. British Educational Research Journal, 31(1), p. 7–27.

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