A Benchmarking Analysis of University League Tables Using the AHP Based on Students’ Perception: UAE Case

Benchmarking is an important technique that universities seek to implement to obtain superior performances. This paper attempts to ascertain benchmarking criteria from the point of view of the students who were involved in benchmarking processes within four United Arab Emirates Universities (UAE-Us). The students in the four UAE-Us are investigated during the period of October 2009 till May 2011 to identify priorities and apply weights for multiple criteria decision-making in the context of choosing a university. The students’ priorities and rankings for choosing a university are tested under the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model. AHP and benchmarking techniques make the implementation and analysis studies more effective and easy and applicable to universities. Further, AHP is used to calculate the relative weights of each criterion, sub- criteria and specific sub-criteria, to prioritize them, and finally to select the important benchmarking criteria within each of the four universities investigated. The overall findings suggest that university reputation and campus are the dominant criteria, while research evaluation performance seems less important within these four universities.