Student-oriented service responsibility and student outcomes: the mediating role of skill-development support

We examine the relationship between student-oriented service responsibility in higher education and students’ degree-value judgments, with perceived skill-development support modeled as the link. Survey data from 1,669 Romanian students (1,655 complete SEM cases) show that enabling resources and standards alignment are both positively related to this support, with a numerically larger unstandardized estimate for enabling resources. Skill-development support is related to higher teaching-quality satisfaction, more favorable EU comparability assessments, and weaker foreign-credential advantage beliefs. All six modeled indirect associations have bootstrap confidence intervals excluding zero, consistent with observable support informing degree-value judgments under delayed verification.