Abstract:

Competition among higher education institutions in Taiwan is currently at an all-time high. For the past two decades, the persisting low birth rate in Taiwan is projected to affect the future enrollments of around 50 of its 158 universities. The Ministry of Education feared that by 2023 these 50 universities might have to either close down or merged together. Hence, for the past few years, the fear of decreasing student enrollments has brought about the importance placed on service quality with regards to students’ satisfaction in higher education. Most universities would provide opportunities for students to express their opinions, suggestions, complaints, grievances, appeals, and comments through various methods, may it be through formal writing to online postings. More important is how schools utilized the collected information and make changes or improvement for the betterment of the entire campus experience. With these having said, the current paper shall present the findings on the experiences of a private university in Taiwan. Within a comprehensive university in Northern Taiwan; Fu Jen Catholic University utilized a Love School Forum, wherein students are able to express both their positive and negative comments towards any school related issues. Sentiment analysis in terms of natural language processing and text analysis was used to identify and extract information from the 3400 comments within the Love School Forum. CKIP tagger was also used to segment the Chinese words, while annotating the part-of speech (POS) and recognizing the name entities. In addition, besides the positive and negative issues, the five dimensions of service quality were also used in categorizing the extracted information. The five service quality dimensions are tangibility – issues regarding physical facilities; reliability – issues whether services are delivered as promised; responsiveness – issues regarding the promptness and attentiveness towards dealings with students; assurance – issues regarding courtesy, trust, and confidence towards faculty and staff; and empathy – issues regarding how the school does best to satisfy the students’ needs. Findings show that besides the usual negative complaints with regards to the physical infrastructure (tangibles) and class related issues (reliability and assurance), there are some requests that are quite constructive and feasible to attain. More important, some did praise the school’s effort in responding to the needs of the students (responsiveness and empathy). It is hoped that by using big data analytics clear patterns can be visualized and assists in minimizing the service gaps within the university. In essence, as the competition between higher education institutions arises, besides the core function of teaching and learning, campus experiences encompassing the extra and intra curricular activities are also paramount contributors to students’ future success. As learning is high with credence qualities; wherein students’ are unable to immediately determine the value of what they have learn or experienced, clear connections to their future career should be made in order to help diminished their uncertainties. At the same, institutions should also help provide positive memorable campus experiences that motivate learning.

Keywords:

Students’ grievances, students’ complaints, big data analytics, natural language processing, python application, SERVQUAL.