Abstract:

After a process of evaluation and accreditation of the universities in Ecuador, improvement plans are proposed at different levels: infrastructure, resources, research and teaching. The improvement of teaching includes students as clients and their perception of quality. In this work we focus on the organizational aspects of quality based on the degree of student satisfaction. Two Universities from the coastal zone and with a marked agricultural profile are taken as an example of a case.

The Universidad Técnica Estatal de Quevedo (UTEQ) was accredited as “type B”. The other one university, Escuela Superior Agropecuria de Manabi, Felix Lopez (ESPAM), was accredited as “type C”. In this study, student satisfaction will be used as a tool to measure the quality of the University.

The objective of this study is to analyse the differences in the level of satisfaction of both Universities regarding the quality of the teaching organization.

At UTEQ University, a stratified random sample composed by 4000 students in the period of 2015-2016 was collected. On the other hand, at ESPAM University a stratified random sample composed by 459 students in the period of 2016 was collected.

The survey was composed by 6 items related to satisfaction. Quality has been measured by the level of student’s perceived satisfaction dealing with the following aspects: lectures/instructors, students’ representatives, administrative officers, materials, communication channels and training contents with a Likert scale from 1 (non-satisfied) to 5 (very satisfied). The comparison of the results was made by comparison of means of independent samples. All statistical analysis were done with Statgraphics.

The values of the UTEQ (Type B) were higher in each attribute than those shown by the ESPAM (Type C) and significant differences were found between these scores (p <0.01) UTEQ, 3.69 pts vs ESPAM, 3.22 pts. However, both universities showed the same behaviour in their answers.

There is an effect of the type of University on the assessment of satisfaction by students. So that the universities considered of "more quality" are highly valued. However, in the evaluation of items we find the same categorization of the answers, the same factors of success (teachers and training content) and the same weak points (administrative officers and students’ representatives).

In both UTEQ University and ESPAM University the best rated item is lectures, with scores of 3.99 and 3.55 respectively (p <0.01). In UTEQ communication channels is the second item with a mean of 3.88, while in ESPAM the second place is occupied by training content, with a mean of 3.45. At last, administrative officers and student´s representatives are the items with lower scores. Administrative officers presents the lowest score in UTEQ with a mean of 3.34 while in ESPAM the item that shows a lower score, with a mean of 2.79, is student´s representatives.

Keywords:

Student satisfaction, Strategic organization, Likert scale, Improvement processes.