Extended GAPs Model to Assess the Quality of Education for Higher Educational Institutions in Bangladesh

Abstract

In the globalized world of the current century, higher education is
becoming more and more competitive and the leading universities must promote
their own institutions not only locally but internationally as well. Higher education is
one of the most significant parts of the education system of a country. The main
objective of higher education is to develop the new knowledge, explore research
works on different social and development issues, anticipate the needs of the
economy and prepare highly skilled workers. In these contexts, higher education
should be standard, welfare and sustainable development oriented. The report
intends to analyze the marketing strategies deployed by higher educational
institutions in Bangladesh. The main objective of this study is to explore the quality
of higher education of higher educational institutions in Bangladesh. Nonetheless,
the paper emphasizes on the students perception and expectations about the present
education system of public and private universities, existing problems and challenges
faced by the higher education institutions. Both qualitative and quantitative methods
have been used for analyzing data. The findings of the study show the different
branches of higher education, its quality and the present opportunity of accessibility
of the students as well as their perceived benefits from higher education. It is
expected that the findings of the study would be able to represent the overall
scenario of higher education system of Bangladesh. This paper also emphasizes the
implications of extended GAPs model to assess the quality of education (EduQual).
Two more GAPs are added with the traditional Five GAPs of service GAPs model. It
was found that the two additional GAPs are associated with the administration of
higher educational institutions. Students’ satisfactions on the service provided by the
instructions have significant effect on the word of mouth communication of the
students. It was found form the study that there two main group of factors influence
the decision of the students namely; personal factors and institutional factors. This
study also indicates the impact of 8Ps on educational institution marketing. The 

factor impacts of the 8Ps components are radical in ensuring student satisfaction all
around. Institutions in the higher education try to provide best quality services
because they need to compete for their students. Measuring quality of their services
is therefore an important task of those institutions that give feedback on the
dimensions of quality that need to be taken care of and offers institutions the
possibility to gain significant competitive advantage in knowledge market. In theory
we found five most used dimensions of service quality.