A comparison of public and private university students' expectations and perceptions of service quality in Jakarta, Indonesia

Service quality has become a predominant part of all advanced organizations' strategic plans. Increasing attention paid to service quality has resulted in more progress and profit in organizations. Higher education possesses all the characteristics of service industry, i.e., intangible, heterogeneous, inseparability, variability, perishable, and the customer (student) participates in the process. However, quality measurement in higher education continues to be a vexing and difficult issue. Most evaluations of higher education have primarily used tangible criteria. The purpose of this study was to examine student's expectations, perceptions and disconfirmation toward service quality delivered by public and private universities in Jakarta, Indonesia. Furthermore, this study also addressed the disconfirmation of service quality when student respondents were classified by demographic characteristics and length of time in the program.; The service-quality disconfirmation paradigm was used in this study, using a modified version of SERVQUAL as a measure. Two focus groups were conducted to capture service quality characteristics in education resulting in 35 items of service quality. A total of twenty-eight items were identified through factor analysis using a varimax rotation. Based on factor analysis, those items were classified into five dimensions: Academic Services and Facilities, Readiness and Attentiveness, Fair and Impartial, Tangibles, and General Attitudes. Cronbach's coefficient alpha was used to measure reliability and found high reliability for all the factors. A total of 282 students from a major public university and 329 students from a large private university in Jakarta participated in the study.; This study found no difference in expectations of service quality between public and private university students. While on perceptions of service quality at private universities and disconfirmation of service quality, this study found significant difference between public and private universities. In general this study found that students at private universities give higher assessments of service quality provided by their university compared to students at public universities. Based on the hypotheses tests, it can be concluded that there were significance differences in students' disconfirmation of service quality when classified by: gender, age, parents' income, parents' occupation. Hypotheses tests on students' disconfirmation classified by parents' education found no significance difference.; Hypotheses tests on disconfirmation of service quality when classified by the interaction of university status and length of time in program found significant differences. Students who attended at least 6 semesters or more at public universities tended to be more satisfied. However, students who attended at least 6 semesters or more at private universities tended to be more dissatisfied. This finding implied that public and private universities in Jakarta should make every effort to give serious attention to teaching-learning processes, since age and length of time in program are related to students' satisfaction with the university.; Furthermore, since the assessment of service quality were directly related to parents' demographic characteristics, providing parents with periodic and up-to-date information about university besides students' achievement may, in turn, influence students' perception on the university's service quality.