Evaluating universities' performance with Fuzzy AHP, Fuzzy Swara and TOPSIS

Many national and international institutions and organizations carry out studies to assess university performance. These assessments are used in processes such as university, equivalence, international transfer, and scholarship application. Therefore, it is critical that these assessments are made in line with objective criteria. In this study, 25 indicators were identified in five main areas that can be used to assess the performance of universities in all service areas. The indicator weighting coefficients were calculated using Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (F-AHP) and Fuzzy Simple Additive Weighting and Rank Assessment (F-SWARA), which are multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods. The performance of 198 universities was assessed by using the determined weight coefficients in the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method. Within the scope of the study, two different benchmarking questionnaires were developed to reflect the views of 12 field experts selected among academics conducting research on higher education systems. According to the findings, the F-AHP main area ranking is "B. R&D, Projects and Publications" (0.418) > "A. Education and Training" (0.335) > "E. Community Service and Social Responsibility" (0.159) > "C. Internationalization" (0.080) > "D. Budget and Financing" (0.009). According to F-SWARA, the main area rankings are A. (0.419) > B. (0.331) > E. (0.107) > C. (0.074) > D (0.070). The Spearman correlation used to examine the relationship between the F-AHS, and F-SWARA weight coefficients was rs=0.743. The relationship between the TOPSIS rankings of universities based on F-AHP, and F-SWARA coefficients was examined and the Spearman correlation coefficient was rs=0.956. The university rankings QS, THE and URAP were compared with the university rankings based on F-AHP and F-SWARA obtained within the scope of this study and the highest correlation was found between F-AHP TOPSIS and URAP rankings (rs= 0.771) and the lowest correlation was found between F-AHP TOPSIS and THE rankings (rs= 0.615).