Prioritization of students’ needs for education service design and development by embedding AHP and fuzzy set theory: A case study

Student satisfaction represents a strategic factor for many universities towards increasing competition concerning students recruitment. Thus, nowadays many universities take into account typical customer-oriented industry’s approaches for the education service design and development. In such a condition, prioritization of students’ needs represents a crucial step to appropriately adopt these approaches. This paper proposes an effective way to evaluate importance of students’ needs based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, in which linguistic variables are parameterized by means of triangular fuzzy numbers, to deal with uncertainty, subjectivity and vagueness. Finally, a case study concerning the degree program in Management Engineering at the University of Palermo (Italy) is performed with detailed considerations on the most responding service aspects on students’ need.