Toward a judgment model of college satisfaction

We define college satisfaction as a student's cognitive evaluation of the overall quality of his/her college life at a particular institution of higher education. College satisfaction is worthy of study because of its link with GPA and turnover, and because it is an important subjective educational outcome in its own right. Most research on college satisfaction has been guided by Spady's (1970) framework. Overall, student attributes, objective college outcomes, and objective characteristics of college environments account for modest amounts of variance in college satisfaction. To augment Spady's framework, we present a preliminary model of college satisfaction that emphasizes inference components and information processing. Hypotheses are delineated concerning how the relations between objective college outcomes and college satisfaction judgments may be moderated by encoding and interpretation, identifying implications, integration of implications, response selection, attention, and memory.