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

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.