Student perceptions and central administrative services: the case of higher education in Italy

In recent years, various reforms have sought to foster forms of marketisation in the Italian public sector, promoting the uptake of concepts such as customer satisfaction and perceived quality. In the field of higher education, such efforts have focused on certain specific areas, like quality of research and teaching, while the quality of administrative services has been overlooked. This article attempts to fill this gap by presenting a study on students’ satisfaction with student central administrative services, conducted through a survey of 12,509 students in 18 Italian universities. The research is of value for two main reasons. First, it proposes and tests a method for analysing and comparing central administrative services quality that could be used in future work. Second, it investigates, on a large sample, the relation between overall satisfaction and two sets of variables: respondent characteristics and service quality attributes. These findings provide insights useful to both managers and policy makers for resource planning and expost evaluations.