QUALITY OF HIGHER EDUCATION ESTABLISHMENTS: DETERMINANTS OF THE SATISFACTION OF FOREIGN STUDENTS IN MOROCCO

Abstract

The higher education is a field which has its own specific features. The concept of "quality" in the matter gives rise to rich debates when integrated in its evaluation. Indeed, few researchers have shared interest in the quality of higher education institutions on which this research will focus. It is well known that any quality evaluation process begins with defining the institution’s costumer. Satisfying costumers is usually based on the knowledge of their requirements and expectations. This moreover isa subject which led to the origin of several strong debates (Becket, 2006)) and studieswhich have concluded that the main client of the higher education of any institution is "the student"(Owlia and Aspinwall,1996; Thonhauser and Passmore,2006). The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the determinants of the satisfaction of foreign students, enrolled in the college of medicine at the Moroccan University. For this purpose, direct interviews method was used on a sample made of 17 randomly selected students. They were asked to evaluate in their own way the quality of the training they are having. They were asked to evaluate their satisfaction concerning the quality of their institution, using qualitative approach through an interview questionnaire. With such small sample (17 students), this is not an evaluative study of the quality thatwe would like to conduct, but it is rather a study aimed at getting the most important variables that are likely to make these students satisfied or not.Our study shed light on 35 determinants of satisfaction mainly associated with the educational dimension. Indeed, we wanted to classify them according to the dimensions of the SERVQUAL model, but our determinants did not all belong to the dimensions of the model, this led us to develop our own dimensions

Keywords

• : the higher education
• quality