Factors Affecting Students’ Understanding of the Quality of Higher Education

Abstract

Students are the main stakeholders in the higher education area so their involvement is closely related to the quality of higher education. There are a lot of factors that affect the understanding of the quality of higher education. Factors are used for quality planning, assessment, assurance, control, improvement etc. The research question is: what factors affect students’ understanding of the quality of higher education? The research was conducted in two stages. During the first stage of the research, the concept of the quality of higher education was analysed by using literature review and focus group discussion. During the second stage, a questionnaire was developed and students of the Faculty of Engineering Economics and Management of Riga Technical University (RTU FEEM) were surveyed, the results of students’ survey were analysed by using Spearman rank correlation. The research shows that there are three groups of factors that affect students’ understanding of the quality of higher education: factors related to the study process (SP), support and resources (SR), and external factors and results (EFR). As a result of correlation analysis, SP factors have more internal correlations within the group, while SR and EFR factors more correlate with each other. The most significant factors that affect students’ understanding of the quality of higher education are the quality of educational content and professors’ competence. Some trends were observed: (1) factors with a small number of correlations have more internal correlations than intergroup correlations; (2) the more important is the factor, the greater is the number of relationships, and vice versa; (3) the more important is the factor, the closer are relationships, and vice versa. There is one exception recognised in the research: although the factor ‘Quality of educational content’, according to the students, is the most important factor, the correlation analysis shows that it has no statistically significant correlations with other factors.