The effect of students' mental image of Gorgan University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources on their perception and expectation of the quality of educational services

In the current situation, the management of universities are facing the challenge of attracting students and the need for them to have a different mental image of the university in the competitive market of higher education. This applied research was conducted to investigate the effect of students' mental image of Gorgan University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources on their perception and expectation of the quality of educational services and was performed using a quantitative research method based on the survey. The statistical population of the study was composed of 500 students. The Krejcie and Morgan table was used to determine the sample size and 216 students were selected by the stratified random sampling method as the study sample. The research instrument was a questionnaire whose validity was confirmed by a group of experts. The reliability of the questionnaire was confirmed by pretest and Teta coefficient (Ө = 0.928, 0.889, and 0.919). The differences between respondents' perceptions and expectations of the quality of educational services using the Wilcoxon test showed that in most cases, the average perceptions of respondents are higher than their average expectations of the quality of educational services. Findings of the Spearman correlation test showed that there is a negative and significant relationship between respondents' perceptions of the quality of academic services and their mental image of the university brand, but there is a positive and significant relationship between respondents' expectations of the quality of academic services and their mental image of the university brand.