Culturally‐anchored values and university education experience perception

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether business students' gender, age and culturally‐anchored values affect their perceptions of their university course experience.

Design/methodology/approach

Culturally diverse business students (n=548) studying at an Australian university were surveyed using previously established scales. Multivariate analysis was used to test six hypotheses.

Findings

High uncertainty avoidance explained unique variation in the six dependent variables analysed using OLS regressions. These dependent variables were: goals, generic skills, good teaching, intellectual motivation, learning community and learning resources. Each of these variables identified different dimensions of a students' university education experience. High collectivism also explained unique variation for all except for goals. High masculinity only explained unique variation for learning resources. Age only produced a unique variance explanation for good teaching, and gender did not produce any. Nevertheless, most of the six independent variables had significant zero‐order correlations with the six dimensions of university experience examined in this study.

Research limitations/implications

Changes in business students' perceptions over time is a limitation of this study, as it was an exploratory cross‐sectional one.

Practical implications

This study's findings may help universities improve their relationship with their total student population by recognising the non‐homogeneous nature of this business student cohort, especially their culturally‐anchored values.

Originality/value

This paper suggests that it may be both possible and useful to identify different student customer segments based on students' culturally‐anchored value orientations, which may be valuable to universities in their efforts to attract, retain and grow an ongoing relationship with students, especially international full‐fee paying students.

Citation

Mitsis, A. and Foley, P. (2009), "Culturally‐anchored values and university education experience perception", International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 23 No. 6, pp. 484-504. https://doi.org/10.1108/09513540910981023