Assessing and Improving User Satisfaction in Higher Education: A Role for Human Factors

Abstract

The success of a human factors perspective in improving customer satisfaction in other industries is suggestive of application to higher education, which is increasingly regarded as an industry. An initial step in a human factors approach to higher education is to furnish a reliable measure of undergraduate customer satisfaction. The present study outlines two studies exploring the Cynical Attitudes Toward College Scale (CATCS; Brockway et al., 2002) as a measure of higher education customer satisfaction. The first study demonstrates the usefulness of the CATCS as a measure of costumer satisfaction by demonstrating differences between two user groups, traditional and nontraditional students. The second study demonstrates its relationship to an environmental design variable, personalization of living space in college dormitories. The CATCS may prove useful in investigating and improving the design of higher education.