FATORES DETERMINANTES DA RETENÇÃO DE ESTUDANTES: ESTUDO EM UMA INSTITUIÇÃO FEDERAL DE ENSINO

Abstract

As competition in higher education market grows up, the educational organizations have been working hard to improve customer relationships with their students in order to reach their needs and to avoid their desertion. In addition, combat the phenomenon of evasion and seek customer retention, in the context of higher public education institutions, has been a relevant approach to educational organizations that follows the good principles of administration and the best resources allocation that drive to the management success. This research sets out to investigate the determinants of students or customer retention, in an exploratory and a descriptive approaches, investigating current and evaded undergraduate students from the Institute Federal Goiano - Campus Morrinhos. In this sense, the main objective of this study is to evaluate the relationships between perceived quality, trust, commitment, loyalty and academic integration and social. The field research was carried out with 314 undergraduate students from six courses offered by IF Goiano - Campus Morrinhos and consisted of three distinct phases, starting with documentary research and flowing to the other two steps in the questionnaire application to current and evaded students. We used the theoretical model of Hennig-Thurau, Langer and Hansen (2001) that seeks a connection between the factors of retention and customers loyalty with factors of retention of students from Tinto (1975, 1993). The data analysis was performed by descriptive statistics, non-parametric tests and application of technique PLS-Partial Least Squares, which showed that 6 of 8 hypotheses suggested in research were validated, strengthening the relationships between the variables. The constructs that had the greatest impact on loyalty/retention of a student were commitment and perceived quality. Based on these results, implications on academic and managerial issues were discussed.