Private University Graduates? Perception towards Soft Skills as an Employability Factor

Sri Lankan tertiary education system is limited as only 15 % to 21 % of students get enrolled to the state university system each year. Consequently, there is a growing demand for private degree awarding institutes in Sri Lanka. With this increasing demand, the quality of the education service provided by these private degree awarding institutes are always questionable. However, the concept of Service Quality in education from students perspective in the local context has not yet been researched. Therefore, this study explores the quality gaps in the education service provided by a leading private higher education institute in Sri Lanka. The examination of this issue is significant to improve the service delivery of the institute to meet the quality requirements of the undergraduates. The purpose of this study is to investigate service quality gaps in the institute while identifying the relationship between the Service Quality and Student Satisfaction. To achieve these objectives, a comparison of students expected service with their perceived service was employed in relation to five generic quality dimensions. The deductive reasoning has been applied for this research with the application Parsu Parasuramans SERVQUAL Model. The primary data was gathered through structured questionnaires from a sample of 450 students. The findings indicated that, there is a discrepancy between students expectations and their perceptions of the service delivered with regard to four quality dimensions such as Responsiveness, Assurance, Empathy and Tangibles under the level of significance 0.05. The highest gap was resulted with respect to the dimension of Empathy. Furthermore, findings resulted that there is a significant relationship between the Service Quality and Student Satisfaction with respect to four dimensions such as Reliability, Responsiveness, Assurance, Tangibles under the significant level of 0.01. However, it resulted that there is no significant relationship between Empathy and Student Satisfaction. The researcher recommends the institute to obtain students feedback to identify the areas of improvement, conduct peer reviews and to improve physical facilities to meet the quality of the service delivery.