Ranking the Selected Universities of Iran in Terms of Quality of Service Provision

Measuring and improving the quality of services in the higher education sector that is the basis of development of each country is very important. The purpose of this paper was ranking the universities of Iran in terms of perceived quality of services from students by using combination of SERVQUAL and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methods. For this purpose at first by systematic search in different scientific databases attempted to finding the researches was conducted regarding measuring the universities quality of service delivery from the perspective of students by using SERVQUAL model that 33 relevant studies were found. Then scores of each university was calculated with the help of DEA method and considering each dimension of quality as an output and by considering each research as a decision making unit via DEAP 2.1 software. Highest scores were related to higher education centers in Tabriz, Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences, Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences and the University of Urmia while lowest scores were related to Islamic Azad University of Dezful and Faculty of Health and Nutrition, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences. The scores of 82 percentage of the conducted researches was between 0.498 to 0.781, in other words were at moderate level. The result of calculated scores showed that on average, there is the possibility of increasing 31.8% in the quality of services in Iran's universities and the main reason for this lack of quality is the responsiveness dimension that relevant authorities can improve the level of their quality of services by modeling of higher education centers in Tabriz.