QUALITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION: WHAT SAY THE UNDERGRADUATES?

Abstract

All over the world, as tertiary education grows rapidly and its cost continues to rise in both public and private sectors there is increasing interest in quality aspects of education. Quality is one of the many concepts in the social sciences that are extremely difficult to define. Given the difficulties in defining quality, literature suggests to take all competing views of stakeholders into account in defining the quality in higher education. Literature suggests four main stakeholders in higher education as ?Providers, Users of products, Users of outputs and the employees of the sector. All these parties are customers of the education system with diverse requirements. This study was based on questionnaires distributed among 100 undergraduates of the Faculty of Commerce and Management studies of the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka to provide a view of quality in higher education from the perspective of critical stakeholder group-Users of products(Undergraduates).Based on factor analysis, quality dimensions were defined and five dimensions of quality; Resource Availability, Information and Responsiveness, Competence of academic staff, Corporate Collaboration, Assessment and Monitoring were together accounted for 69.5 percent of the total variance. The dimension of Competence of academic staff reserved the highest and Assessment and Monitoring was placed as the least perceived quality dimension from undergraduates? perspective.