Abstract
During the recent years, many stakeholders like researchers, policymakers and even students have paid more attention to the efficiency and performance of higher education. Although no single indicator is sufficient to describe the organizational quality of the university, graduation rate has become one of the key indicators of university success. There are clearly many factors that affect students' ability and willingness to complete their studies successfully, but previous studies have clearly shown that high student satisfaction has a positive impact on the graduation rate. The focus of this paper is on the part-time Master of Engineering programs of a Finnish university of applied sciences (UAS), and the empirical part of the study examines the relationship between student satisfaction and graduation rates based on the internal graduation records of the UAS and the data from the Finnish national student satisfaction survey (AVOP). The findings of the study suggest that student satisfaction is a multidimensional structure, and satisfaction with the content of the studies and the thesis has a statistically significant impact on graduation from the Finnish Master of Engineering programs.
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I would like to acknowledge Statistics Finland, the Ministry of Culture and Education and the Finnish National Agency for Education for collecting and sharing the AVOP data for research purposes.
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Koivisto, M. (2023). Student Satisfaction and Graduation Rates in Finnish Master of Engineering Programs. In: Guralnick, D., Auer, M.E., Poce, A. (eds) Creative Approaches to Technology-Enhanced Learning for the Workplace and Higher Education. TLIC 2023. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 767. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41637-8_23
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