Pengaruh Marketing Mix dan Kualitas Pelayanan terhadap Keputusan Masuk Universitas dengan Kepercayaan sebagai Variabel Mediasi: Studi Kasus Maba Manajemen Universitas Persatuan Guru Republik Indonesia Semarang

Abstrak

This study examines the influence of marketing mix and service quality on university enrollment decisions, with trust as a mediating variable, among new students of the Management Study Program at Universitas Persatuan Guru Republik Indonesia Semarang in 2025. Employing a quantitative approach and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) with AMOS on 159 respondents, results reveal that service quality positively and significantly affects enrollment decisions (p=0.018), as does trust (p=0.011). Conversely, marketing mix shows no significant effect on trust or enrollment decisions, either directly or through trust mediation. The failure of marketing mix as a predictor is attributed to the post-pandemic homogenization of promotional strategies among private universities, where prospective students — increasingly positioned as rational consumers — no longer differentiate institutions based on conventional marketing signals. Instead, they rely on direct experiential evidence such as staff responsiveness, administrative clarity, and facility availability as primary decision-making anchors. Theoretically, this study reinforces service-dominant logic by confirming the primacy of service quality over marketing mix in competitive private higher education markets, while affirming a paradigm shift from marketing-driven toward service-driven institutional strategy. Practically, university management is advised to reallocate resources from conventional promotional budgets toward frontline staff training, administrative process optimization, and campus facility upgrading as the primary strategy for attracting prospective students.