What accounts for students' loyalty? Some field study evidence

Purpose – Public funding of institutions offering higher education is becoming scarcer, more complex, and to an ever‐increasing extent performance‐based. Concerning the teaching area the financing is partly based on student credits and professional degrees. Thus student loyalty has become an important strategic theme. The purpose is to study relationships between student satisfaction, students' perceptions of the reputation of an educational institution and student loyalty; hypothesizing positive relationships between satisfaction and loyalty, reputation and loyalty, and between satisfaction and reputation. Antecedents of student satisfaction and reputation are also included in the study.Design/methodology/approach – The data source is a survey among students at the bachelor level of a university college in Norway, analyzed by a structural equation modeling approach.Findings – The findings strongly support the three hypotheses. The university college may be looked upon as being satisfaction‐driven. Still ...

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