Benchmarking the Higher Education Institutions in Egypt using Composite Index Model

Abstract

Egypt has the largest and most significant higher education system in the Middle East and North Africa but it had been continuously facing serious and accumulated challenges. The Higher Education Institutions in Egypt are undergoing important changes involving the development of performance, they are implementing strategies to enhance the overall performance of their universities using ICT, but still the gap between what is existing and what is supposed to be for the self-regulation and improvement processes is not entirely clear to face these challenges. The using of strategic comparative analysis model and tools to evaluate the current and future states will affect the overall performance of universities and shape new paradigms in development of Higher Education System (HES), several studies have investigated the evaluation of universities through the development and use of ranking and benchmark systems In this paper, we provide a model to construct unified Composite Index (CI) based on a set of SMART indictors emulate the nature of higher education systems in Egypt. The outcomes of the proposed model aim to measure overall performance of universities and provide unified benchmarking method in this context. The model was discussed from theoretical and technical perspectives. Meanwhile, the research study was conducted with 40 professors from 19 renowned universities in Egypt as education domain experts.