STUDENT SATISFACTION AND QUALITY OF EDUCATION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BARI

The process of measurement, evaluation and efficiency improvement of the Italian Universities has become fundamental for the accountability to various stakeholders: students and their families, institutions, companies and especially the Government, that is the main financier. Recently, the Italian universities have adopted a competitive behavior in order to maximize their share of public resources allocation, in a framework of constant reduction in funding. In this competitive scenario, students can be considered as "customers", since they can choose the university in which to enroll or change it in the case of dissatisfaction if it doesn't meet their expectations (Petruzzellis et al., 2006). For this reason, Universities should plan their educational offer also on the basis of the needs expressed by their stakeholders, first of all taking care about students‘ placement and continuous improvement of service quality. The last reform of the Italian university system has been aimed at improving the quality of service offered, entrusting the National Agency of Evaluation (ANVUR) to oversee the related processes. Using the data collected by the last survey "Opinione degli studenti", this paper deals with the assessment of the student's satisfaction in the three areas of education, teaching and interest for academic courses, as stated by Anvur questionnaire. Through a descriptive and a multivariate statistical analysis (Principal Component Analysis), student satisfaction has been measured with reference to the quality of teachers, teaching materials, and logistical support, under the most relevant variables: students' percentage of lessons attendance, type of course (first and second level degree) and course scientific group. It emerges that the quality of teaching seems to be related to "tangible aspects" as perceived by students: teaching materials, interesting lessons, teacher clearness, coherence topic consistency with the contents of the course website, teacher availability for additional explanations. In the following years, one of the most important challenges for the academic courses coordinators might be the adoption of specific initiatives aimed at reaching the 100% of satisfied students; they have to be sure of the reliability of student judgments