Identifying and Ranking Student Support Strategies in Higher Education Using Hybrid MCDM Technique

Abstract

Colleges are not spared of such complicated issues dealing with how to effectively establish and enact strategies that can maximize student achievement and quality of education. In this research, a hybrid Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) model involving the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and the Technique for Order Preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) shall be proposed as a way of estimating and ranking student support mechanisms. FAHP is employed to obtain the relative values of criteria where uncertainty is involved whereas TOPSIS is used to obtain the closeness coefficient of each alternative in terms of being close to the ideal solution. To explain the versatility and applicability of the model, a case study is carried out. Decision Matrix is developed based on the survey of 400 students of different institutions in Andra Pradesh and opinion of senior faculties with over 15 years of experience. The strategies that are considered to support student in academics, career guidance, counselling, peer mentoring, and financial aid are considered in terms of criteria are considered to be as accessibility, effectiveness, satisfaction, cost efficiency, and impact on retention. The findings unveil the best practices in their respective fields as to the role of career-oriented assistance and interactive online learning settings in enhancing academic success. The last approach is financial aid, perhaps because of its relative inaccessibility and bureaucratic nature. The graphical presentation of the analysis based on bar and radar charts also shows the performance disparities between the alternatives which gives intuitive results to the academic administrators. The results confirm that the hybrid FAHP -TOPSIS model is a powerful, versatile, and transparent decision-support mechanism that can address the inherent ambiguity and subjectivity of educational assessment. This paper adds a replicable methodological paradigm which is applicable to other decision contextures like curriculum planning, institutional ranking, and quality assurance.