Multifactor assessment of universities competitiveness using fuzzy maximin convolution method

Abstract

The paper presents a description of the maximin convolution method for assessing the competitiveness of universities, provided that the assessment criteria used here are not only of different nature, but different significance as well. The modern market of educational services sets for universities the task of providing strong competitive positions. To solve this problem, it becomes necessary to assess the current level of competitiveness of the university in the context of its marketing space. The fuzzy model described in the paper, taking into account the main weakly structured indicators of the marketing environment, allows for a well-balanced ranking of universities according to their levels of competitiveness. If necessary, the model can be easily adapted to regional specifics and / or changed requirements of the customer (user). In the context of this study, the methodology of a non-standard task of determining the consistency of opinions of involved experts on a set of indicators of the marketing space for the subsequent identification of their generalized weights, which ultimately determine the priority or importance of the applied evaluation criteria, is considered. In other words, a new expert approach was proposed to determine the weighted coefficients of the estimated indicators of the marketing space, based on the application of heuristic knowledge. Its main advantage is that it covers a fairly wide range of important factors of the marketing space of the educational services market, which have a significant impact on the levels of competitiveness of universities. The research results can be used to assess the quality of the educational business process at universities, both at the regional and state levels.