TITLE:
Customer, Product, or Both? A Systematic Review of SERVQUAL-Based Educational Quality Assessment
AUTHORS:
Afnan Mohammed Jameel Mandili, M. Mirahan-Zedan
KEYWORDS:
SERVQUAL, Educational Service Quality, Higher Education, Student Satisfaction, Labor Market Alignment, Graduate Employability, Systematic Review, PRISMA
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.14 No.8,
August
10,
2026
ABSTRACT: The SERVQUAL model has been widely adopted in higher education research as a framework for measuring educational service quality through the gap between users’ expectations and perceptions. Despite its extensive application across diverse educational contexts, limited attention has been paid to how SERVQUAL is conceptually framed with respect to stakeholders and educational outcomes. This study presents a PRISMA-based systematic review of 30 empirical studies published between 2004 and 2024 to examine how the SERVQUAL model has been applied in measuring educational quality and which stakeholder perspectives have guided these applications. The review synthesizes evidence from studies conducted across multiple regions, including the Middle East, North Africa, Asia, and Europe, and across various educational settings such as public and private universities, postgraduate programs, and distance education. The findings indicate that SERVQUAL has been applied predominantly as a student-centered service evaluation tool, focusing on operational and administrative dimensions such as facilities, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. Across contexts, studies consistently report negative gaps between students’ expectations and perceptions, highlighting areas for internal service improvement. Critically, none of the reviewed studies conceptualized the labor market as the ultimate customer of higher education or treated graduates as the primary service output of educational institutions. Although employability and labor market alignment were occasionally acknowledged, they were not operationalized within the SERVQUAL framework. The study calls for labor-market-oriented and multi-stakeholder adaptations of SERVQUAL to support outcome-based educational quality assessment.