DOI: 10.5176/978-981-08-8957-9_QQE-009
Authors: M.A.T.K Munasinghe & U.A.H.A Rathnasiri
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.
This study was based on questionnaire distributed among 100 undergraduates of the Faculty of Commerce and Management studies in 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, five dimensions were derived and were named as Resource Availability, Information and Responsiveness, Competence of academic staff, Assessment and Monitoring, Corporate collaboration.
The study revealed that 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.
This study was limited to the perception of undergraduates in Commerce and management studies in one of the universities in Sri Lanka. Further it would be useful to complement this study with studies from other perspectives than the undergraduates. Any single stakeholder perspective can only give a limited view and needs to be complemented with the other perspectives.
Keywords: Quality, Higher education, Undergraduates
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