Perception of Service Quality in Higher Education: Perspective of Iranian Students of Malaysian Universities

This article presents a gap analysis by measuring the perception and expectation of service quality in igher education from the perspectives of Iranian postgraduate students. This article first tries to understand the phenomenon for Iranian students to change their preference from studying in niversities in the West to those in the East, particularly Malaysia. In addition, this article seeks to ssess their perceptions of service quality in the new environment based on a modified service quality (SERVQUAL) instrument to measure five constructs: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, ssurance, and empathy. After conducting a pilot study, the instrument was administered to 163 ranian postgraduates who were selected based on stratified sampling on the top five public niversities in Malaysia. The analysis started with descriptive analysis followed by factor and reliability nalyses. Single mean t-tests were then conducted to assess the significance of the gaps based on ll the 35 items of the modified SERVQUAL. The study uncovered that all of the items and onstructs easuring the gaps are significantly negative with empathy representing the construct ith the highest gap (-0.681), followed by reliability (-0.673), responsiveness (-0.670), assurance - .612) and tangible (-0.601)