Abstract:
In today’s aggressive competitive education business world, service quality has become one
of the most important determinants of student satisfaction. It has also become the key to
sustainable competitive advantage for mainly service providing organizations as well as for
the education sector. The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the relationship
between service quality and student satisfaction in private external higher education
institutions in Jaffna. Additionally, this study attempts to examine critical factors in service
quality dimensions that contribute most to the satisfaction of the students. The Service
quality scale, which comprised of 46 service quality statements under five dimensions
namely, tangibility, responsiveness, reliability, assurance and empathy has been used as the
data collection instrument. In order to collect primary data, 200 external
undergraduate/Professional studies students randomly selected from two private external
education service providers in Jaffna.
