College Student Satisfaction Typology and Its Relationship With Engagement Patterns

Abstract

College Student Satisfaction Typology and Its Relationship With Engagement Patterns Jihee Hwang (bio) and Felix Wao (bio) College student satisfaction and engagement are important indicators of the quality of student learning experiences and outcomes in higher education. Researchers have found student satisfaction to be positively related to student persistence and academic success (Kuh, 2009; Strahan & Credé, 2015). On the other hand, student engagement "represents the time and effort students devote to activities that are empirically linked to desired outcomes of college and what institutions do to induce students to participate in these activities" (Kuh, 2009, p. 683). The extent to which students express satisfaction with their educational experience and overall success is influenced by the extent to which they are engaged in the college experience (Korobova & Starobin, 2015). Therefore, understanding the level of student satisfaction and how this relates to engagement patterns is important for practitioners at institutes of higher education to foster an institutional environment which students are both engaged in and satisfied with various aspects of their college experience (Webber et al., 2013). One way to achieve a better understanding of the closely related concepts of student satisfaction and engagement is to uncover the dynamics between them—only partially addressed by researchers to date (Webber et al., 2013). Using student satisfaction as the sole data source provides an incomplete picture of what students experience on campus, because student satisfaction surveys pertain only to students' personal perceptions and evaluations of their experiences. Student satisfaction should be examined as a multifaceted construct rather than as a single dimension (Strahan & Credé, 2015). Using a global satisfaction measure (with questions such as "Are you satisfied with your institution overall?") as a foundation for making institutional decisions is problematic. For example, students may have had a very poor experience with parking spaces, which may have an unduly negative impact on their satisfaction overall even when their academic advising experience was satisfactory; thus, disaggregating multifaceted dimensions of student satisfaction is important to better understand students' experiences and viewpoints (Thomas & Galambos, 2004). We classified student satisfaction groups based on 5 dimensions of satisfaction measured by a home-grown Student Satisfaction Survey (SSS) and examined students' engagement patterns in relation to the groups identified. We focused on two research questions: Based on data collected from the SSS, can students be classified into groups that have distinctive satisfaction patterns? How do satisfaction groups differ in their engagement patterns? METHOD Data Collection and Sample The data used in this study were drawn from the Student Satisfaction Survey (SSS) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) administered at a large research university located in the Midwest. The SSS [End Page 118] instrument consists of 25 items measured using a 5-point Likert scale. It is administered every spring semester via email. In Spring 2016, 3,114 undergraduate students responded, yielding a 16% overall response rate. In the same semester, the institution also participated in the NSSE: 1,314 first-year students and 2,029 senior students completed that survey, yielding an overall response rate of 28%. The final sample for this study comprises first-year and senior students who responded to both the SSS and the NSSE (N = 1,185: 505 first-year students and 680 senior students). This sample was derived in two steps. First, of the students who responded to the SSS, only undergraduate students were included in order to identify clusters of undergraduate student satisfaction. For the second stage of the analysis, the satisfaction clusters to which the undergraduate students belonged were considered in relation to their NSSE responses. The NSSE is designed to collect data from first-year and senior undergraduate students, as both these groups of students are regarded as being in critical transition, that is, at a point of entry and a point of exit, respectively (Gardner & Van der Veer, 1998; Hurtado et al., 1996). For this reason, we focused on the satisfaction typology and engagement patterns of first-year (FY) and senior students (SR). Variables To identify student satisfaction variables, we performed an exploratory factor analysis for the 25 items included in the SSS, which resulted in 5 scale items: academic experiences, academic advising, campus involvement, campus diversity, and student support...