Abstract
The attainment of excellence in institutions is maintained through the institutions’ adherence to its core values and efficient service delivery. These factors are very important in facilitating global development of a country and determining the world ranking of an institution. To this effect, this study presents an effective approach for evaluating and ranking quality of services in a higher institution, taking four higher institutions in Nigeria as case studies. Service quality consists of different attributes and many of them are intangible and difficult to measure, which means that using the previously known measurement approach will be insufficient. Therefore, a fuzzy method was proposed to resolve the ambiguity of the concepts and intra-uncertainty, which are associated with human judgments in decision-making. This study adopted a contextualized service quality model for educational domain called HiEdQUAL with some extended criteria in order to evaluate the perception of service quality by respondents from the selected higher institutions: two private universities and two public universities from the south-west region of Nigeria. Four Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methods: TOPSIS, Yager’s min-max, Compensatory AND, and Ordered Weighted Averaging are applied to comparatively evaluate the quality of services in the four higher institutions. The MCDM methods are engaged independently to validate the reliability of the ranking results. The importance weight of each performance criterion is found with Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) algorithm. This study has been able to practically establish Ext-HiEdQUAL as a new service quality model for higher education with six concepts and 33 criteria. The output of the Fuzzy MCDM ranking recommends institution B as the best institution to students based on the Ext-HiEdQUAL measures. Also, findings from the sensitivity analysis showed that Yager’s min-max outperform the other investigated methods in this study by being consistent and exceptionally tolerant in most instances when there is significant deviation in criteria weights.
Highlights
Tertiary institutions are pivotal in driving the economic growth and sustainability of a nation
Most governments in developing countries disburse funds to public higher institutions so that tuition fees for students are subsidized, unlike what happens in private institutions where the cost of tuition is higher. is mode of government’s financial support is geared towards improving the quality of service being rendered by these institutions to their primary customers, which in turn leads to an increase in student subscription, creation of more values, and higher excellence [1]
Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) algorithm using the iterative power method was proposed to obtain criteria weights that were defined in the extended multi-dimensional HiEdQUAL model. e fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) alongside the four fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methods were implemented with Java programming Language. is study was able to present the general importance of each service quality factor, reveal each institution’s shortfalls and strong points quantitatively, and rank the institutions based on multiple criteria
Summary
Tertiary institutions are pivotal in driving the economic growth and sustainability of a nation. A fuzzy MCDM approach is proposed to evaluate and rank quality of service in four Nigerian higher institutions based on Ext-HiEdQUAL. E following commonly used four MCDM methods, TOPSIS, Yager’s min-max, Compensatory AND, and Ordered Weighted Averaging, were proposed to comparatively evaluate and rank service quality in four Nigerian higher institutions. Fuzzy MCDM will (1) enable handling of subjectivity in the evaluation of competing alternatives; (2) cater to the hierarchical order of importance of criteria dimensions that makeup the service quality model used for evaluation; and (3) demonstrate the reliability of the ranked results by comparing results from four MCDM methods and show the stability of each of the MCDM methods by employing sensitivity analysis. (2) A comparative evaluation of four fuzzy MCDM methods to validate reliability of the ranked results using a contextualized extended HiEdQUAL model for measuring quality of service in higher institutions.
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