ANALYZING THE PERCEPTIONS OF TURKISH UNIVERSITIES USING MULTIDIMENSIONAL SCALING (MDS) ANALYSIS

Abstract

With the number of public and private universities in Turkey increasing and with the selection mechanisms offering ever more increased freedom of choice to prospective students, it is becoming important to analyze how students perceive differences among the most preferred Turkish universities. Education marketers may use perceptual maps either to see the current state of the market or to plan for new product launches (in this case, new universities). This paper analyzes the perceptions of the ten most preferred Turkish universities as judged by undergraduate students at universities around Turkey. The Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) technique is used to come up with a perceptual map of the ten most preferred Turkish universities in management education, after obtaining data in the form of similarity judgments, attribute ratings and preference ratings from the respondent students. Additional analyses are performed to attribute meaningful names to perceptual map dimensions, and also to determine the ideal point of the perceptual map. The results indicate that the three private universities plus Galatasaray University form a distinct cluster on their own, while the other six public universities are separated into two distinct groups occupying unique positions in separate quadrants of the perceptual map. It is also found that the ideal point indicates the direction of Bogazici University, ODTU and ITU.