A graduates’ satisfaction index for the evaluation of the university overall quality

In the higher educational setting, students provide a relevant contribution to the quality of educational services. In such a context, the measurement of the perceived quality and related satisfaction for the university experience are of primary interest to evaluate the efficiency and efficacy of the learning processes. In this contribution, we aim at assessing the overall quality of the graduates’ university experience in terms of internal and external efficacy by applying the ECSI (European Customer Satisfaction Index) methodology, based on structural equation models and primarily developed in the context of customer satisfaction. For this aim, we propose a modified ECSI model tailored for the higher educational setting, explicitly taking into account the differences among groups of degree program. The study is carried out on data collected by the AlmaLaurea surveys at the University of Florence (Italy) in the period 2014–2017 and concerns a sample of more than 2,000 graduates. We find out eight latent variables that contribute to define the overall quality of university experience. These variables are differently affected by the type of degree program, with the highest levels of external efficacy observed for degree programs belonging to the educational, health, and engineering groups. It also turns out that interventions on the internal efficacy (i.e., quality of hardware and quality of humanware) have a direct positive effect on the university (i.e., loyalty) and an indirect positive effect on the society (i.e., external efficacy).