A Study on Factors Influencing Student Loyalty Towards Higher Learning Institution

Student loyalty is referred as student willingness to provide positive appraise about their institution and give good recommendation to other people such as friends, family, employers, and organizations. It is an important issue for university authorities in working on long-term strategic planning. In order to ensure student loyalty towards university, their planning should include strategies on providing the best services despites budget constraints, student accommodation placement, competition with other universities and lack of student enrolment. Previous studies have revealed that student loyalty is affected by various factors namely student satisfaction, student trust, service quality and university image. Typically, these factors are inter-correlated with each other. Hence, statistical method such as multiple linear regression which frequently used method in this type of study is inappropriate since it is very susceptible to inter-correlation between variables. The Partial Least Square (PLS) modelling is more suitable for constructing predictive model in the situation. The results indicate that students' choices on university may highly depends on the services provided by university and the university image. It also shows that the most important service quality that students emphasizes is on instructor quality and social environment. Since university image also one of the significant factors that influences student loyalty, it is crucial for university to retain a good reputation in the public by providing good value of money.