A novel hybrid MCDM approach to evaluate universities based on student perspective

Abstract

University rankings are an essential source of comparisons between universities according to specific combinations of criteria. International or national rankings have an increasing impact on higher education institutions, stakeholders, and their environments. Thereby, on behalf of effective decision-making, university-ranking efforts should be a process involving some conflicting criteria and uncertainties in a more sensitive manner. This study presents a detailed university evaluation procedure under certain service criteria via multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methodologies and provides an appropriate clustering of universities according to teaching and research factors. A hierarchical cluster-based Interval Valued Neutrosophic Analytic Hierarchy Process (IVN-AHP) integrated VIKOR methodology that includes two stages, clustering and ranking, is proposed for the university evaluation problem. The hierarchical clustering method is performed using teaching and research factors in the first stage. The second stage addresses the determination weights of service criteria through IVN-AHP and the ranking of universities by using VIKOR according to service criteria under determined clusters. This study, in which the proposed methodology is applied to Turkish universities, is the most comprehensive in terms of the number of universities evaluated and participating students. Furthermore, the integration of IVN-AHP and VIKOR to solve MCDM problems is presented for the first time. This study differs from other studies in terms of novelties both methodological-based and application based. Moreover, categorizing universities with similar characteristics into groups using cluster analysis and ranking them with the MCDM methodology provide a more realistic and effective interpretation of the results.

Revealing the Barriers of Blockchain Technology for Supply Chain Transparency and Sustainability in the Construction Industry: An Application of Pythagorean FAHP Methods

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MCDM Review in marketing and managerial decisions: Practical implications and Future research

“…From an initial screening of the literature of the last two decades from some of the best search engine for an effective literature research, like the Web of science, Scopus and Google Scholar, we found that MCDM methods have been used in many diverse contexts, like: waste water treatment for resources protection (Garcia -Garcia, 2022;Coban et al, 2018;Hadipour et al, 2015;Qin et al, 2017); Chandrakar and Limje, 2018), production and IT industries for the selection of materials and other organizational fields (Sandström, 1985;Brown & Wright,1998;Ghaleb et al, 2020;Zhu et al, 2021), Economics and logistics (Zavadskas & Turski, 2011;Yıldız & Aybar, 2019;Zopounidis et al, 2015;Yuksel et al, 2018;Kowalski et al, 2009), health sector (Frazão et al, 2018;Adunlin et al, 2015;Kahraman et al, 2020;Afshari & Khorsand, 2020) education (Malik et al, 2021;Ayyildiz et al, 2022;Bhattacharyya & Chakraborty, 2014;Alias, et al, 2008), environmental science (Zavadskas et.al., 2014;Geldermann, et al, 2000;Vaillancourt & Waaub, 2004;Huang et al, 2011;Bhanutej & Rao, 2023). We can argue that till today, several research projects were made for measuring the impact of multi-criteria decision-making methods in diverse fields by achieving a mapping of the number of articles and the most cited MCDM methods.…”

Sustainability Ranking of Turkish Universities with Different Weighting Approaches and the TOPSIS Method

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