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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.

Purpose: The paper aims to identify the emerging themes on the challenges faced by the Malaysian private higher learning institutions (HLIs) in the provision of providing quality education. Design/methodology/approach: Semi-structured interviews were purposively conducted with 29 of the Malaysian private HLI internal and external stakeholders ranging from the relevant personnel of the institutions (the quality director, administrators and senior academics), regulatory agencies, prospective employer, students and parents. Thematic analysis was then applied to analyze the participants' responses in determining and clarifying the challenges faced by the Malaysian private HLIs in the issue of providing quality education. Findings: Eight overarching themes were identified, namely, Academics, Facilities, Students, Programs and curriculum, Competition, Accreditation, Finance and Research. Academics represent the most frequent challenge raised by the participants, whereas Research emerged as the least mentioned challenge during the interview sessions. Research limitations/implications: The present paper focused solely on Malaysian private HLIs, and thus, the findings may not be applicable to the foreign private HLIs that are operating in Malaysia as well as to the public HLIs. Originality/value: The findings are expected to provide valuable guidelines to the Malaysian Private HLIs in areas where resources need to be critically disbursed. To the regulatory agencies and policy-makers, the findings could enlighten them on the difficulties faced by these privately funded institutions so that further policies can be designed and implemented to assist these institutions in their operations and long-term survival.

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]