ISSN: 2222-6990
Open access
This paper addresses the understanding of how university rankings influence students to enter Malaysian universities, which until now has been a little subject explored, although such lists have been of increasing importance. This paper points out how rankings, apart from other important factors such as academic reputation, program availability, and personal preference, along with financial concerns, influence prospective students and their parents in making a choice. This study is a survey data analysis of the two target segments, prospective students and their parents, using Python for analytics and visualization of the data. This leads to a comprehensive view of the influence of rankings among other variables on university choices. Findings show that university ranking is imperative for both students and parents; however, parents are more concerned about the issue of the ranking since it deals with their child's future. On the other hand, academic reputation and the number of programs offered also emerge as a strong determinant in the decision-making process. Instead, what universities should be doing is not to compete for better ranking status but to focus efforts on the improvement of educational services and campus support. Data-driven insights and interactive visualizations emanating from this research will allow universities to derive actionable information on what drives enrolment decisions and strategically make decisions on effective marketing and development activities concerning the attraction and retention of students. As a result, the findings below have brought out the imperatives in adopting multidimensional strategies toward university choice and thus provided useful guidelines to universities in Malaysia on how to conduct the ranking and non-ranking factors in the competitive higher education landscape.
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