Quality of higher education experience, satisfaction, and well-being: genuinely caring for our students-consumers

This study aims to contribute to the existing literature on higher education marketing by proposing and empirically testing a theoretical model linking higher education quality, student satisfaction, and subjective well-being. The bottom-up spill over theory, the stimulus-organism-response theory, and the expectancy-disconfirmation theory, inform the development of the theoretical model of the study. A cross-sectional survey design is adopted, and data are collected from a sample of students from Mauritian Universities. The model is estimated and tested using a variance-based and prediction-oriented approach to structural equation modelling, specifically partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). The results demonstrate that approximately one-fifth of university students’ subjective well-being is explained by the quality of their student life and their satisfaction with higher education services. Based on these empirical results, we discuss and present key implications for higher education marketing.