Measuring academic service performance for competitive advantage in tertiary education institutions: the development of the TEdPERF scale

Public and private universities are in constant competition in order to select the best possible students. Thus, student satisfaction has become increasingly relevant for higher education institutions. Assessing academic services performance allows universities to differentiate themselves from others through the improvement of service quality. In our study, we aim to measure service quality in tertiary education institutions in Mexico. In order to do so, we have used a service performance approach to develop a new scale, which is specifically targeted for tertiary education institutions: TEdPERF (Tertiary Education PERFormance). This scale has been tested for reliability, validity and dimensionality. Moreover, the scale has proved to measure key factors of service quality performance in Mexican higher education institutions. Finally, we describe the full process through which the scale was developed and validated.