Okay, maybe the title is a little clickbait. But I assure you it’s for good reason. University is a big part of our lives (or at least mine), not only do we choose to study here for four or more years, but we also – whether cognitively or not – choose which University. There are a lot of reasons to stay at a University, maybe financial, community, reputation, or shockingly quality of education.
Most of the time these decisions are made by our feelings and other qualitative measures. But what if these reasons for being loyal to a University aren’t really your own… at least not completely?
A study by Chieh-Peng Lin and Yuan Hui Tsai in 2008 used Information Cascade theory to quantitively study why people are loyal to their University of choice. Using two frameworks as guides (below).
Without necessarily going into the statistical side of things, the study made use of Information Cascades to evaluate the influence of a social network (or group) on the perception of one’s University of experience. Unsurprisingly and coinciding with well documented sociological processes, people who had social networks that perceived higher quality teaching and administration within a University, had their own perception higher as well.
The value of one’s perception of the University coincided with their retention, but once again in a new Information Cascade network, it was also seen that networks that perceived that other people had higher retention, were more inclined to have higher retention themselves. And all of these factors combined to form an analysis of a student’s loyalty. The weight of these factors are summarized below.
So, this would suggest that student loyalty is most heavily influenced by perceived quality of education. Which seems reasonable due to the fact that, at the end of the day, that is the purpose of the University.
However, as the study even admits, there are many factors not fully disclosed here that may be very important influencing a student’s loyalty. One factor is that this study was done in Taiwan and admits that there may be cultural biases to the data gathered. The most egregious missing factor is a community perception which can heavily influence someone’s choices.
How many people chose a University because their friends chose it? How many people stay at a University because they made friends there? How many people have fond memories of a University because of the people they met, and suggest that University to others because of that? Likewise, how many people leave a University because they couldn’t connect with anyone? Etc.
So, what does this study mean? Is it that our perception is too skewed by the information cascade that we are a part of? Well, no, not exactly. Of course the people around us influence our opinions and its okay to let those opinions steer us towards what we think we want. We are social creatures after all. But, maybe take a minute or so, trying to really contemplate, “do we actually like it here?” and see what you think.
Reference
Lin, C.-P., & Tsai, Y. H. (2008). Modeling Educational Quality and Student Loyalty: A Quantitative Approach Based on the Theory of Information Cascades. Springer. Retrieved November 16, 2022, from https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11135-006-9051-5.pdf
One reply on “Do We Actually Like it Here (University)?”
I find your analysis interesting and how a students loyalty is strongly influenced by how they perceive their education quality to be, perhaps rather than how their education quality actually compares to others.