Empirical Study On The Zone Of Tolerance Of The Services Quality Of The Graduate Education

With China’s accession into WTO on December11th2001, according to the provisions of Article13in’general agreement on trade in services of WTO’that the higher education falls within the scope of education service trade.The feature of the graduate education service makes it follow the principle that the student is the focus. The student is the most important customer, so the school should both grasp the students’ expectations and also consider the various needs of the students’ development in order to provide better education service.This thesis applied the research framework of the consumer’s zone of tolerance in traditional service industry to the graduate education industry, and the conceptual model of both the zones of tolerance of the quality of higher educational services and the influencing factors is proposed. Firstly based on previous research results and combined with the characteristics of the education service, the modified SERVQUAL scale is used to measure the quality of graduate education service. Secondly the graduates are classified according to the gender, learning style, degree type, grade, and professional type in order to measure the two influencing factors which are the image and the reputation of the university and the students’participation. By the analysis of variance and correlation, the influences of every factor on the zones of tolerance, the adequate service level and the desired service level of the graduate are tested.The following conclusions are obtained on the basis of the empirical research design and the statistical analysis of data:The graduate students have the different zones of tolerance according to the different dimensions of the quality of educational service. In addition, the zones of tolerance of the assurance and tangible dimension which are more important for graduate students are relatively more narrow, thus their desired service level and adequate service level are relatively higher; While the gender and the grade have no significant difference on the zone of tolerance and its upper and lower limits, the learning style, degree type and professional type have significant difference on them. A positive correlation exists both between the image as well as the reputation of the university and the desired service level and between the image as well as the reputation of the university and the adequate service level. A negative correlation exists between the image as well as the reputation of the university and the zone of tolerance; the more the students’participation is, the higher the desired service level and the adequate service level are.Finally, the findings of this thesis provide the suggestions for the university to understand the expectations of the graduate on the education service level and improve both the quality of the education service and the graduate satisfaction. In the meantime, the research limitations of this thesis are discussed and the future research directions are prospected.