Realizing the strategic plan of a top-tier university in Taiwan: A multi-criteria evaluation and alignment

The major objective of higher education is to meet the international and local demand for top talent, the core driving force in enhancing its international competitiveness. Since Taiwan is facing increasingly fierce international competition as it begins to open its education market, the government´s “Plan for Developing World-class Universities and Top-tier Research Centers.” is aimed at building world-class universities to improve the overall quality of higher education. There is therefore a great need for a set of evaluation criteria and an alignment model to realize the strategic plan of achieving the educational objectives. This paper presents a framework to measure the extent to which the strategic objectives of a top-tier university in Taiwan are aligned with the results obtained through the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). To achieve this, the Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) techniques will be used to create a strategic map. With the cause-and-effect relationship extracted from the strategy map, one can discover gaps that exist between the strategic objectives and the present status. Our study conducted a case study on Taiwan´s higher education, using National Cheng Kung University´s implementation of the top-tier university plan as an example.