A Predictive model on quality education of Rwandan private higher education

Abstract

Quality education has grown to be one of the most important pillars that every nation should value to be able to address global challenges and achieve sustainable development. The literature, however, revealed that quality education was an issue in many countries worldwide (Bosu, Agormedah, & Asare, 2018; Nguyen, 2009), and studies were done to find out the factors that were most connected with the quality improvement in higher education. Particularly in Rwanda, the literature on quality education only addressed the issue of quality of learning (Mbabazi, 2013; Schendel, 2015), and there was no empirical study done on the factors affecting quality in Rwandan higher education, specifically involving students as respondents. The purpose of this study was to find out students’ perceptions of the factors that affected quality education

in Rwandan private higher education institutions (HEIs) and generate a predictive model of quality education. This correlational study was conducted in eight private higher education institutions in Rwanda. The questionnaire was the main tool of data collection, and it was distributed to 582 students. Only 568 were returned. After data cleaning, 500 cases remained for data analysis. The SPSS software program was used to code and analyze the data. The descriptive statistics, independent t-test, a one-way ANOVA, correlations, and the multiple regression were the main statistical analysis used to answer the research questions. The findings revealed that female students were the majority in Rwandan private HEIs, and they were in the age between 19 and 24 years old. The results showed that a significant number of respondents were in the second year and from the day program. This study also showed that the students perceived that Rwandan private HEIs had a moderate performance in terms of administrative quality, campus facilities, and community service. Further, they perceived that core educational quality, transformative quality, and quality education were highly performed. This study also revealed that there was no significant difference in campus facilities quality among all categories of demographic profile. Administrative quality did not differ significantly except in the year of study. Core educational quality differed significantly in the study program. Community service quality and quality education differed significantly in the category of age only. Transformative quality differed significantly in the category of the study program and age. The findings of this study showed a strong positive correlation between core educational quality and campus facilities quality, transformative quality, community

service quality, and quality education, and a strong positive correlation between community service quality and transformative quality, and quality education. There is also a moderate positive correlation between administrative quality and campus facilities quality, core educational quality, transformative quality, community service quality, and quality education, and a moderate positive correlation between campus facilities quality and transformative quality, community service quality, and quality education. However, the final model shows that community service quality, core educational quality, transformative quality, and campus facilities quality are the factors that affect quality education, and the predictive model of quality education explains 62.3% (R Square = .623) of variances.