A study on students’ satisfaction towards student retention in Cosmopoint Colleges in East Coast Region / Haizie Suhaiza Haksah @ Abdul Ghani

Students and their satisfaction are the major concerns in determining the success or failure of a higher education institution. An educational institution should provide good quality education services to the students as this will be a factor that can influence their choice of admission, and at the same time, lead to students’ satisfaction towards their college or university and affect their decisions to enroll and stay at the institution. Hence, the objective of this study was to determine the factors of students’ satisfaction towards student retention at three campuses of Cosmopoint College in the East Coast region of Malaysia. The factors that contributed to student satisfaction; academic experience, campus facilities, staff approachability and social integration were examined in this study. The data was collected from 265 respondents who were from the three Cosmopoint College campuses using a stratified random sampling technique. They were required to answer the constructed online questionnaire. Descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis methods were used to analyze the data. The results indicated that all factors of student satisfaction and student retention had a strong relationship. The four predictor models were accounted for 68.8% of the explained variance in student retention. Among all independent variables, social integration was the most significant factor of students’ satisfaction that affects student retention. The overall results were expected to contribute to the theoretical development in order to enable higher education institutions to take appropriate actions in improving student retention.