Determining the Factors of Quality of Higher Education in Private and Public Universities in Bangladesh

Abstract

Ensuring quality education is a prerequisite for sustainable development. Studies suggest the inclusion of variables in finding the determinants of quality tertiary education, as the customers are well diversified with students, their parents and guardians, and academic and administrative staff, each having different needs and objectives. Thus, this paper tries to incorporate forty-eight “quality characteristics,” previously found significant by various studies, with a few uniquely <span class="highlighter highlight-on">appropriate</span> local characteristics. The characteristics have been grouped into six dimensions: tangibility, competence, attitude, content, delivery, and reliability. The results show that the quality of private university education mainly depends upon the competence of their academic and administrative staff, the content of their curriculum, the institution's reliability, and the staff's attitude. Regarding public universities, competence, content, and reliability are the variables significantly affecting the quality of their education. The findings also revealed that the provision of tangible facilities such as hostels, libraries, and visually appealing environments, together with the delivery of teaching presentation techniques and feedback from the students, are insignificant in determining the satisfaction of the students of the private universities. The policymakers of public universities should ensure that content, reliability, and competency remain the prime concerns to ensure student satisfaction. Thus, the public university authority should be highly concerned with its up-to-date curriculum that instills teamwork capabilities, provides interdisciplinary knowledge, and helps to build effective communication skills. As the study was done to find out the quality of university education from the customer’s perspective, students were taken as the only sample for the study. However, a comprehensive study may be done using the other customers, namely the guardians and the administrative staff.