Internship programs organized by universities are vital since they introduce students to a real business environment while reinforcing the reputation and attractiveness of the institution. This research study examines university business students' satisfaction with internship programs concerning various factors, such as internship effectiveness, organization, object, and implementation company. A specially developed questionnaire was conducted and applied during March to May 2021, and 173 cases were collected. The research outcomes of student satisfaction were analyzed with the Multicriteria Satisfaction Analysis (MUSA) method. MUSA is considered an aggregation-disaggregation approach developed on the qualitative analysis regression. According to the calculated weights put on the criteria, the organization of the internship was the most crucial criterion, while more emphasis should be put on the object of the internship and on the internship effectiveness which the students underappreciate. Business students, student satisfaction, internship program, multi-criteria analysis
Education is an instrument that helps societies move forward since, without education, society would
collapse as its established members expire. Knowledge dissemination is the main objective of an
educational system. According to Bass (1997), education consists of all the knowledge that a person
has acquired up to the present time and continues to grow until the end of the person's life. Therefore,
the education received in schools, universities and lifelong learning training centers is a small part of a
person’s education, including other informal education sources such as the knowledge gained through
the occupational and social experience during a person’s life
In comparison, 42.8% hold a tertiary education degree. On the other hand, Greece has the highest
percentage among the OECD countries of the unemployment rate for the tertiary education graduates,
at 23.2%
An intern “is someone working in a temporary position with an emphasis on education rather than employment. Thus, an internship is similar in several respects to an apprenticeship” (Weible, 2009). An essential prerequisite for the successful implementation of an internship program is the study of the satisfaction of the students that take part in internships. The internship helps students understand the business environment and enables companies to take advantage of new knowledge, skills and
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innovative ideas, which students transfer through close contact with the academic and research
community. Also, companies that offer quality internships have the opportunity to create a pool of
valuable human resources, through which they can draw capable future executives, upgrade their
corporate image and promote their reputation as employers (employer brand). This cooperation between
universities and businesses must be strengthened since sometimes there is a gap between the theoretical
knowledge offered by the universities and the actual job demands
Therefore, this paper aims to explore student satisfaction and locate and analyze the factors that are
involved in it by applying a multi-criteria methodology known as MUSA
The research aims to measure student satisfaction from the internship program organized by the school of Administrative, Economics and Social Sciences at the University of West Attica.
The University of West Attica is situated in the area of Egaleo in Athens-Greece. It is the thirdlargest university in Greece under the criterion of registered students since it has over 50,000 registered students in 27 departments operating under five schools. This university was established in 2018 because of the Technological Educational Institute of Athens and the Technological Educational Institute of Piraeus merger. Since 2018 there has been a new course program offered to all students. Still, the old program is also in operation until the graduation of students who have selected to get the degree of a technological orientation.
The questionnaire was applied to 173 business students who followed an internship program for
2021. The survey was conducted in March-May 2021. In this research, customer satisfaction criteria
and sub-criteria are selected based on an extensive review of the relevant literature
Object of internship: satisfaction from the daily tasks and job relevancy to the student’s previous knowledge Internship organization: satisfaction from the total organization and monitoring of the internship program from the university Internship effectiveness: satisfaction from the benefits and knowledge gained from the internship program % Percent 34.2 65.8 24.7 75.3 19.2 11.0 13.7 21.9 19.2 15.1 24.7 75.3
The satisfaction survey results were based on MUSA's multi-criteria model (Multicriteria
Satisfaction Analysis). The Multi-criteria Satisfaction Analysis (MUSA) method was used to measure
customer satisfaction. The technique is an ordinal–regression-based approach used to assess a set of
collective satisfaction functions so that the global satisfaction criterion becomes as consistent as
possible with customers' judgments
Where represents the estimation of the global value function, n represents the number of criteria, bi is a positive weight of the i–th criterion, σ+ and σ− are the overestimation and the underestimation errors, respectively, and the value functions Υ* and Xi are normalized in the interval [0,100]. The global and partial satisfaction Y* and Xi* are monotonic functions normalized in the interval [0,100]. Thus, in order to reduce the size of the mathematical program, removing the monotonicity constraints for Y* and Xi*, the following transformation equations were utilized:
where y*m is the value of the ym satisfaction level, xi*k is the value of the xik satisfaction level, and α and αi are the number of global and partial satisfaction levels. According to the aforementioned definitions and the assumptions, the basic estimation model can be written in alignment with the following linear program formulation: (1) (2) where M is the number of customers, n is the number of criteria, and xi*j, y*j are the jth level on which variables Xi and Y were estimated.
The results given by MUSA method showed that students seem to be totally satisfied with the quality of internship. Based on Figure 1, the total student satisfaction amounted to a high 94.27% scoring.
Concerning calculating the weights presented in Figure 2, the criterion of “Internship organization” had the highest weight 55.3%, followed by “implementation company" at 21.34%. In comparison, the "Internship effectiveness" criteria and "object of internship” had 11.89% and 11.47%, respectively.
Moreover, the action diagram of Figure 5 denoted that none of the criteria fell in the action area (high importance-low satisfaction). This means that there were no critical criteria in which students were dissatisfied. Furthermore, the criterion of Internship organization fell in the leverage opportunity area, so this criterion may be considered as the competitive advantage of UNIWA business school internship program, which should be further improved and promoted.
Through the internship program, the first contact of the graduate students with their profession is
achieved. The student integrates into the work environment of a well-organized company that is active
in the broader field of the student's specialization and actively participates in the production process.
Students acquire experiences beneficial for their subsequent professional career in procedures
concerning the operation and organization of a business, which are impossible to achieve, through the
teaching of a course
During the internship, the student is in a transitional stage, he /she is certainly not an employee, but neither is he/she a student in the classical sense of the word. The student is trained in a real work environment, and this does not require full integration in it. To achieve this, students must show responsibility, work harmoniously with their colleagues, obey their boss's orders, be formal, polite, discreet, willing, and generally show their best self.
In the context of the evaluation of the internship prepared by the student, the supervising professor regularly visits the company to have a complete picture of the conditions of education/work of the student. These visits are usually a first-class opportunity for the supervisor professor to get acquainted with the company's executives. Consequently, they are the starting point for essential collaborations, which mainly concern solving technical problems that its available staff cannot address. A typical example of the benefits of an internship for both the Department and the company is that combining the institution's experience and internship results in most remarkable work. The solution to the company's real problem encloses an immediate and tangible application. It requires the direct cooperation of the student, the supervising professor, and the company's executive.
The internship can be a competitive point to attract students to the university since that program can improve the university's reputation and connection to society and also help businesses in a period of economic development (Weible, 2009).
This satisfaction survey highlighted the competitive advantages of the internship program offered to business students at the University of West Attica. According to the calculated weights put on the criteria, the organization of the internship was the most crucial criterion, while more emphasis should be put on the object of the internship and on the internship effectiveness, which the students underappreciate. An improvement to those areas, should make the internship experience more targeted to the student’s personal needs and ambitions. The university policymakers should continue to invest in internship programs since this includes many advantages and connects the student to the real business world.
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