The role of service quality management in students’ re-enrollment

The students’ re-enrollment can reflect as one of the indications of an educational institution’s service quality and student loyalty. The re-enrollment is identified by the condition that students enrolled in one semester would re-enroll in the next immediate semester. The main concern of this article is that there are many interrelated variables affecting students’ re-enrollment. Those variables mainly included service quality management of higher distance education, student characteristics, student academic success, accessibility to student learning support services. The study applied ex-post-facto method with a sample of 3539 students and used a statistical technique of the binary logistic regression to identify factors related to student re- enrollment in three regional office centers of Universitas Terbuka, Indonesia, identified as low, medium, and high in service quality management. The results revealed that the students’ re-enrollment is affected by the level of service quality management modulated factors: (1) the student personal characteristics, (2) the level of success in previous semesters, and (3) the participation in the learning support services. The paper discusses the implications of managing the students’ re-enrollment based on the findings.