STUDENTS’ SATISFACTION ON SERVICE PROVIDED BY PRIVATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGES: A CASE OF SELECTED PRIVATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGES IN ADAMA CITY ADMINISTRATION

Evaluation of students' satisfaction is found essential in understanding the level of their expectations and identify factors that become causes for students' withdrawal. Hence, this study intends to examine students' views regarding service quality that private University Colleges provide. The relationship between service quality and student satisfaction as well as factors of service quality that contribute most towards satisfaction of students were investigated in this study. In Adama City Administration there are five private University Colleges offering under graduate programs of which three were randomly taken for sample of this study. 200 questionnaires were distributed and 170 were duly filled and received. SERVQUAL model consisting of tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy created by Parasuraman et al (1988) were used to measure student's perceptions on service quality. An exploratory research design is used and data is analysed using‘Statistical Package for Social Science' software or IBM SPSS Statistics, version 23. This study reveals that there is a significant and positive relationship between tangibility, assurance, reliability, responsiveness, and empathy and student satisfaction. Among the various dimensions Reliability has the highest correlation with student satisfaction followed by Assurance, Responsiveness, Empathy, and Tangibility. Further, this study indicated that there is association between age, gender and students satisfaction. Furthermore, the result indicates that all the dimensions are highly correlated and very significant with one another.