Abstract
The number of higher education seekers has been increasing globally and in particular this sector has been the fastest growing industry in Kenya. The demand for higher education has been amplified by the liberalization of education in the country which has seen heavy investment and expansion in higher education. However the increased student enrolment in these institutions has unfortunately been met with reduced government funding for Public Universities resulting to serious challenges in service quality delivery and student satisfaction. These challenges have in many occasions led to students’ unrests resulting to disruption of studies and university operations. As service institutions, public universities depend heavily on both teaching and non-teaching staff to deliver their services. The funding crisis in the higher education has left public universities unable to only to attract and retain qualified staff but also to recruit adequate permanent staff. This has forced most of these institutions to rely on casuals and part time teaching staff which causes a serious threat to quality in service delivery and student satisfaction. The study aimed at examining how and to what extent human elements of service influences student satisfaction. The study employed a descriptive research design. Stratified random sampling procedure was used to pick a sample of 1976participants from a target population of 270,120 students from the selected five public universities. The study used a questionnaire to collect data from the sampled students and a pick and drop process of administering the questionnaires was used. Regression analysis and ANOVA were used to analyze the data and to test the research hypotheses. The study findings indicated that, human elements positively and significantly influenced satisfaction of student at public universities in Kenya (F = 2575.326, p< 0.05). The study concluded that employee in public univerities are critical in the satisfaction of students with the services offered by the universities. This study recommended that management of public universities invest well in their human capital to enable the deliver the quality of services necessary for student satisfaction. Keywords: Human Elements, Student Satisfaction, Public Universities DOI : 10.7176/EJBM/11-20-05 Publication date :July 31 st 2019
Highlights
In the higher education sector, student satisfaction has been seen as a temporary attitude which is formed when a student undergoes through an educational experience
If Public Universities take students as consumers of their education services who can add value through their active participation in the process of education service delivery, students ought to be seen as the primary customers for Public Universities, a view that is adopted by this study
The model summary for these variables revealed that each of the variables coefficients of determination (R2) explained the variation of the dependent variable with varying levels (Reliability 44.3%, Responsiveness 46.3%, Assurance 48.8% and Empathy 54.8%). This implies that, among the individual variables of human elements, empathy is the most critical factor which contributes most to students’ satisfaction. These results were similar to the finding of Hasan and Ilias (2008) who in their study to establish how student satisfaction related with service quality at a private higher education institutions found empathy to be strongly related to satisfaction followed by assurance, responsiveness and reliability
Summary
In the higher education sector, student satisfaction has been seen as a temporary attitude which is formed when a student undergoes through an educational experience. If Public Universities take students as consumers of their education services who can add value through their active participation in the process of education service delivery, students ought to be seen as the primary customers for Public Universities, a view that is adopted by this study. Given this view that the primary customers of education services are the student, the term customer and student were understood to mean the same for this study and is used in alternate. The customer will be satisfied with received services or not, depending on whether the expectations of that customer are met or not (Yılmaz, 2009). It is a post evaluation that compares the perceived quality with expected quality
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