Building The House of Quality in Higher Education

Generally education and specially higher education is one of the main development bases of each country. So, evaluation and continuous quality improvement of education and learning in higher education during in recent decades has been considered by the universities of the world. This study applies Quality Function Deployment (QFD) technique to evaluate and improve the quality of educational programs. The target population consists of PhD students who study in the management course in public universities in Iran (Tehran, Beheshti, Allame Tabatabaee, Tarbiat Modarres and Esfahan), during the second semester of 2007-08. 80 members out of 328 members of statistical population were selected. A questionnaire was used for data collection the selected sample. According to the results of this study, the most important quality requirements, as perceived by students are: Acquiring the latest organizational experiences / Proficiency in analytical skills / Stimulate students’ thinking / Proposing useful and sufficient references, examples and assignments / the Professors’ scientific ability and their criticism morale. Moreover, regarding the results, there is significant difference between requirements importance level and access of students in their requirements. Thus, it would be necessary to change from existing situation to desired situation in which the mentioned indices are categorized from low to high.