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The effectiveness of government financing is a challenge in various industries, including higher education universities. The funding source and the resources' size are the key determinants of quality education. The problems arise in multi-criteria decisionmaking, where many subjective opinions are needed from the experts. It is, therefore necessary to prioritize the limited budget available for important criteria. On the other hand, multi-criteria evaluation leads to technically rigorous and enlightened university budget decisions. This paper proposes the exploitation of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in budget allocation at one of the public universities in Malaysia. This study's participants were eight top management experts in managing expenditure at the faculty level. The findings showed that the most significant factors in deciding budget allocations are Teaching and Learning (0.30) and Maintenance (0.26). Furthermore, the most dominant sub-criteria were laboratory and equipment devices (S4) and training and conferences (S10), with a weighted mean of 0.682 and 0.664, respectively. The weights were aggregated by the geometric mean and median, as well as the simulated mean and median, which showed deviating results and rank reversals. The geometric mean weights differed significantly. In contrast, the aggregation using measures of the median was similar to the geometric median, with only a few rankings criteria differing. This highlights that the median score is significant in weight calculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop a hierarchical model to rank the challenges faced by the private Malaysian higher education institutions (HEIs) in the provision of quality education and subsequently their corresponding critical success factors (CSFs) to address those challenges. Design/methodology/approach: A sequential mix method was adopted in this study. Semi-structured interviews with 29 participants were initially conducted to identify the challenges and CSFs. This was followed by a questionnaire survey involving 158 respondents to prioritise the identified findings. Thematic analysis was conducted in the qualitative stage, uncovering the challenges and their corresponding CSFs. Data for both stages were accumulated from internal and external stakeholders of Malaysian private HEIs. Finally, the four stages of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) were applied to rank the challenges and CSFs. Findings: The qualitative stage identified eight challenges, i.e. "academics", "facilities", "students", "programmes and curriculum", "competition", "accreditation", "finance" and "research" together with their corresponding CSFs. The AHP enables the ranking of these challenges. "Finance" has been found to be the most crucial challenge and "high competency in managing the institution's finance" as the most important CSF to address this challenge. Research limitations/implications: As the study restricted its focus on Malaysian private HEIs, the results may not be generalised for public HEIs and foreign private HEIs operating in Malaysia. Originality/value: The hierarchical model developed in this study is deemed important for implementation to resolve the prioritised challenges. It spells out the specific areas in which the resources of Malaysian private HEIs need to be prudently disbursed and properly managed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HSBL University College is one of the privately run institutions of higher learning in Malaysia which offers, among others, various programs in Economics, Accounting and Business Administration. A recent survey conducted by the Faculty of Business (FB) of HSBL found that the students were not fully satisfied with the teaching and learning system of the college. The present work has been carried out to identify the FB students' requirements to improve the efficacy of the teaching and learning system. Having identified the requirements, a number of lecturers were contacted to extract the design requirements that would address the students' needs. The novelty of the paper is that Quality Function Deployment and Analytic Hierarchy Process both have been applied to derive the priorities of the design requirements. The results obtained by the above two methods have shown close resemblance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]