Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine whether business students' gender, age and culturally-anchored values affect their perceptions of their university course experience. Design/methodology/approach: Culturally diverse business students (n 1/4 548) studying at an Australian university were surveyed using previously established scales. Multivariate analysis was used to test six hypotheses. Findings: High uncertainty avoidance explained unique variation in the six dependent variables analysed using OLS regressions. These dependent variables were: goals, generic skills, good teaching, intellectual motivation, learning community and learning resources. Each of these variables identified different dimensions of a students' university education experience. High collectivism also explained unique variation for all except for goals. High masculinity only explained unique variation for learning resources. Age only produced a unique variance explanation for good teaching, and gender did not produce any. Nevertheless, most of the six independent variables had significant zero-order correlations with the six dimensions of university experience examined in this study. Research limitations/implications: Changes in business students' perceptions over time is a limitation of this study, as it was an exploratory cross-sectional one. Practical implications: This study's findings may help universities improve their relationship with their total student population by recognising the non-homogeneous nature of this business student cohort, especially their culturally-anchored values. Originality/value: This paper suggests that it may be both possible and useful to identify different student customer segments based on students' culturally-anchored value orientations, which may be valuable to universities in their efforts to attract, retain and grow an ongoing relationship with students, especially international full-fee paying students. (Contains 13 tables.)