Prioritizing Strategic Objectives and Projects in Higher Education Institutions: A New Hybrid Fuzzy MEREC-G-TOPSIS Approach

Higher education institutions (HEIs) aim to achieve a significant impact on research, learning, teaching, and community services, which are core elements of their strategic plans. Determining the priorities of strategic objectives and related projects is crucial for the successful implementation of HEIs’ strategic plans. However, such prioritization necessitates the use of effective methods capable of dealing with several conflicting criteria in their objectives and ambiguous inputs from the decision-makers. Therefore, this study proposes a new integrated approach for prioritizing the objectives and projects of strategic plans in HEIs. The proposed approach utilizes a hybrid of the fuzzy method based on the removal effects of criteria using the geometric mean (fuzzy MEREC-G) and the fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution (fuzzy TOPSIS). The proposed approach was tested on a strategic transformation plan at one of the Saudi Arabian universities and showed that it effectively prioritizes the objectives and projects of the university’s strategic transformation plan. Sensitivity analysis demonstrated the proposed approach’s stability in providing consistent rankings under different criteria weights. The proposed approach offers decision-makers in HEIs an effective tool that assists in prioritizing the objectives and projects of their strategic plans.