UniversityCompass: An AHP-Based Ranking and Selection App for University Prospecting in Developing Countries

The university selection problem occurs when university prospects need to make college choices in the face of multiple universities based on preferences. University search web apps are decision support tools used by prospects to ease the search process. A review of such web apps revealed that these platforms were developed for universities in the USA and the UK and do not Nigerian Universities. In this paper, we propose UniversityCompass, an AHP-based ranking and selection app for prospects intending to study in Nigerian Universities. Since its live hosting, UniversityCompass.com had been assessed by over 1,000,000 users in more than 4,000,000 page views, which underscores its usefulness in aiding undergraduates prospecting of Nigerian Universities. We observed the highest spike in page views are the periods that coincides with peak of university search in the country, i.e. January. In addition, more than 85% of the respondents considered UniversityCompass as a suitable platform for university search and rated the app as either “very good” or “excellent”.