Multiple criteria decision-making techniques in higher education

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to review the literature which focuses on four major higher education decision problems. These are: resource allocation; performance measurement; budgeting; and scheduling. D Design/methodology/approach - Related articles appearing in the international journals from 1996 to 2005 are gathered and analyzed so that the following three questions can be answered: What kind of decision problems were paid most attention to?; Were the multiple criteria decision-making techniques prevalently adopted?; and What are the inadequacies of these approaches? Findings - Based on the inadequacies, some improvements and possible future work are recommended, and a comprehensive resource allocation model is developed taking account of these factors. Finally, a new knowledge-based goal programming technique which integrates some operations of analytic hierarchy process is proposed to tackle the model intelligently. Originality/value - Higher education has faced the problem of budget cuts or constrained budgets for the past 30 years. Managing the process of the higher education system is, therefore, a crucial and urgent task for the decision makers of universities in order to improve their performance or competitiveness.