A Fuzzy Multicriteria Decision Making Approach in Higher Education

Abstract

Higher education has become a competitive service industry, with a booming number of institutes trying to answer the increasing demand for university graduates. While students search for the best, universities are working hard to recruit a larger number of them. It is hardly possible to identify the particular factor(s) that make students select a specific university. Because students select universities based on multiple factors of different weights, a multicriteria decision-making approach is required. Therefore, as a first attempt in the literature, this paper has employed Fuzzy TOPSIS to evaluate the performance of universities in implementing student-recruitment activities based on the selection criteria valued by applicants. Since the available information in such an area is incomplete, and especially because the higher education industry is people-based, Fuzzy TOPSIS enables both students and higher education authorities, as well as their marketing managers, to maximize the efficiency of their decisions. The proposed approach comprises three main steps: i) criteria are listed; ii) linguistic terms are allocated to criteria and alternatives (universities); iii) the fuzzy TOPSIS approach, represented by a numerical application, is applied. The proposed approach benefits practicality in generating the best decisions under uncertainty.