Quest for a New Instrument for Measuring Academic Program Quality

Abstract

This research explores and confirms a new way of measuring the quality aspect of an academic program based on hospitality education. In our opinion, there is a growing demand for specialists in hospitality education in India. The fact that the number of hospitality education institutes is increasing doesn't go hand in hand with the care for the quality of education. Hence, we present one set an alternative trajectory by offering a new instrument APQUAL for measurement of quality of hospitality program offered by an educational institute. A critical review of the literature on the major instrument for measuring higher education quality has been done. The empirical part of the paper presents the developed in eight steps APQUAL construct that is an effective instrument to analyze the academic program quality. This work explored a number of facets of program quality by employing EFA (exploratory factor analysis) and CFA (confirmatory factor analysis) to fit the first order nonrecursive model and calculated the reliability and validity of our proposed instrument. This research provides a valid measure of academic program quality, which can be also applicable at the micro-level.