Gaining insight into student satisfaction using comprehensible data mining techniques

As a consequence of the heightened competition on the education market, the management of educational institutions often attempts to collect information on what drives student satisfaction by e.g. organizing large scale surveys amongst the student population. Until now, this source of potentially very valuable information remains largely untapped. In this study, we address this issue by investigating the applicability of different data mining techniques to identify the main drivers of student satisfaction in two business education institutions. In the end, the resulting models are to be used by the management to support the strategic decision making process. Hence, the aspect of model comprehensibility is considered to be at least equally important as model performance. It is found that data mining techniques are able to select a surprisingly small number of constructs that require attention in order to manage student satisfaction. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.