Comprehensive evaluation of higher education systems using indicators: PCA and EWM methods

The higher education system refers to the organisational structure of higher education institutions and the staff and infrastructure needed to provide postsecondary education. To better develop a country or region’s higher education system, administrators need to have a handle on the current state of the system, which requires regular and realistic assessments of the quality and sustainability of higher education. Thus, this study constructed a quality-sustainability model (QSM) for national higher education. Nine countries with developed higher education and 13 indicators were selected to reference higher education quality and sustainability globally. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to downgrade these 13 indicators and extract the factor coefficient score matrixes. Of these, four principal components were used for further analysis. Each sub-indicator is assigned weights by the entropy weighting method (EWM) to obtain a quantifiable QSM. The model innovatively includes indicators such as “academic integrity” and is applied experimentally to data from nine countries to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of their higher education systems. The study found that each country’s education system has different strengths, and by comparing and summarising them, the findings can guide the development of future-oriented higher education. This study has made some development recommendations based on the model by combining multidisciplinary theories. The study enriches existing methods for assessing the quality of higher education and identifies the weaknesses and directions for the development of higher education in some developed countries.