Social Media and Student Experience: What Do Google Reviews Say?

The aim of this study is to provide an analysis of online student reviews into the various factors which create satisfying or dissatisfying student experiences. Guided by a qualitative methodology, this study recognises that online reviews represent an insider’s perspective of a phenomenon. Student reviews of twelve Australian universities were extracted from Google reviews for the period of June 2019 to November 2020. The manual content analysis of the online reviews was further assisted through analysis with the Leximancer software. The study identifies the dominant themes and concepts that students share about their university experience as part of online reviews. It shows that both expressive and instrumental factors contribute to the satisfaction of students, and instrumental factors are sometimes particularly evident in the emotionally charged language used to complain about certain aspects in the student reviews. Data from online student reviews provide the opportunity to gain insights into new forms of feedback on the experience of students.