Students’ Satisfaction and Its Determinants: The Case of Two Eastern Ethiopian Universities: Comparative Analysis of Jigjiga University and Dire Dawa University

The ever increasing size of students at Colleges and Universities in Ethiopia also reflect that they are entering colleges with more diverse cultural characteristics and needs than ever before. The purpose of this study was to see the determinants and level of satisfaction of Dire Dawa University and Jigjiga University students attending their regular higher education programme of three years in the common Colleges of Social Sciences and Humanities, Business and Economics and Natural and Computational Sciences. Three departments were randomly selected by using Simple random sampling method from each college namely Geography, Political Science, Psychology, Economics, Management, Accounting, Management, Statistics, Biology and Chemistry respectively. A total of 346 participants and 6 FGDs’ members (n=36) were used from regular students of undergraduate programme (2016/2017) in Dire Dawa (n=189) and Jigjiga University (n=157). FGDs and questionnaires were both developed by adapted from the standardized students’ satisfaction measures (SSI) used earlier and similar studies by the researcher based on the purpose of the pilot tested with 22 participants for the questionnaire and 8 participants for the FGDs. Computation of mean, standard deviation, percentages, frequencies, one way ANOVA and Ttest were used to analyze the collected data through SPSS version 20. Findings generally indicated that variables; Institutional Effectiveness, Academic Support, Advice and Counselling, Effectiveness, and Admission, Enrolments and Admission, Enrollment and Registration effectiveness had significantly affected the students’ satisfaction in both universities. The independent samples t-test showed that there had been no significant differences between the two universities in their perceived relation between their expectation and their actual college experience.

Author(s): Abeya Degefe Terfasa

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