WHAT REALLY MATTER? A STUDY ON THE DETERMINANTS OF PERCEIVED QUALITY IN THE COURSE OF AN INSTITUTION OF HIGHER MIDWEST OF MINAS GERAIS

Abstract

In December 1996, the Brazilian government promulgated the National Education Act that represented a new milestone in the institutional environment of higher education. Amongst a wide range of changes, the new Act implied a series of new regulations and an exponential growth of new institutions. Initially, those institutions were supposed to allow more students to enroll in a higher education program. However, the statistics show that the great majority of the new institutions were privately-owned, which has a tremendous effect on market demand since many Brazilian citizens do not have the necessary resources to financing an undergraduate course. As a result of that, Brazilian higher education market must deal with an unbalanced relation between offer and demand in which the first is significantly higher than the latter. Because of that, many institutions try to improve the quality of its educational services as a strategy of attracting new students and keeping the ones that are already enrolled in one of its undergraduate programs. This paper consists in a survey made with a sample of 435 undergraduate students of a institution located in the middle-west of the state of Minas Gerais. The research main purpose was to identify the attributes that count the most for higher levels of perceived quality. Through the use of the stepwise multiple discriminant analysis, it was possible to verify that perceived quality was highly affected by three attributes: the value the student gives to the program, the amount monthly paid by the student to take the program and the interest showed by institution faculty and employees to help students to solve problematic situations. The conclusions inferred that although an economic-type rationale is important to perceived quality, so it is the attitude demonstrated by the institution members to offer good services to the students.