Resumen
Globalization has created an increased demand for ?quality higher education? in all developing counties including Bangladesh. In Bangladesh the middle class is expanding and the emerging middle class families can now afford the costs of higher education. However, service quality has been identified as the critical strategic issue in the education sector. Most of the public and private universities in Bangladesh have failed to satisfy the increasing demand for high quality education. In this paper, we explore the service quality determinants from the standpoints of both perceptions and expectations of the students in the private universities in Bangladesh. We have tried to extract the crucial factors affecting the service quality that are necessary to improve the quality of higher education and to gain a competitive edge. The study utilizes the SERVQUAL model to examine the service quality of several private universities and explores the factors affecting the service quality. By applying factor analysis, we identify the basic dimensions of service quality using the ?principal component technique. We have concluded that among the five selected factors, the tangibles dimension variance has the highest explanatory power for perception instrument, whereas the responsiveness dimension variance explained the highest for expectation instrument.Keywords: Quality of higher education, Service Quality Improvement, student, perception, student expectation