Internationalisation of Higher Education: Service Quality in Higher Education in Selected Southern Hemisphere Countries

The tertiary sector has over the last two decades developed from a predominantly inwards focussed industry serving public interest to an internationalised and commercially competitive industry. This fundamental change resulted in amongst others a drive to better understand the most prominent dimensions that impact on internationalisation, more particularly the expectations and experiences of students. Although some of these changes can be argued to be country specific and thus differentiated between markets, others are universal and impact on the overall industry. One of the latter changes is a pressure to consider and treat students as clients, introducing all the dynamics of service delivery and management. This paper considers the importance of service delivery related to the market positioning of academic institutions in Australia and South Africa with a particular focus on non-academic internationalisation activities. The main findings reveal that the most important variable in the non-academic category is an effective induction program.