Pareto analysis of critical factors affecting technical institution evaluation

Article history: Received December 20, 2011 Received in Revised form March, 25, 2012 Accepted 23 April 2012 Available online April 27 2012 With the change of education policy in 1991, more and more technical institutions are being set up in India. Some of these institutions provide quality education, but others are merely concentrating on quantity. These stakeholders are in a state of confusion about decision to select the best institute for their higher educational studies. Although various agencies including print media provide ranking of these institutions every year, but their results are controversial and biased. In this paper, the authors have made an endeavor to find the critical factors for technical institution evaluation from literature survey. A Pareto analysis has also been performed to find the intensity of these critical factors in evaluation. This will not only help the stake holders in taking right decisions but will also help the management of institutions in benchmarking for identifying the most important critical areas to improve the existing system. This will in turn help Indian economy. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
Over the recent years, technical education in India has gone through rapid, radical and even revolutionary changes.This has generated opportunities to open technical institutions with business orientation.Thousands of technical institutions have come into existence since 1992 in India.Some of these institutions are very good and have realized the importance of quality but there are many insitituations with low level of required educational requirenments.So students are in a great confusion to select the best institution for their higher studies.Every year entrance exams are conducted in India and students have a lot of options in terms of institution according to their ranking.Although many agencies provide ranking of the institutions every year but these ranking are contradictory and instead of solving the problem, alleviate it.Moreover these rankings seem to be influenced or biased.An engineer with the thorough knowledge places a great role in Indian economy than to an engineer holding just a graduate degree.Even the technical institutions themselves want to be benchmark with the peers for improvement.So the problem of technical institution evaluation is important for everyone and has great role to play in everyone's life because everybody is associated with education in one or other way.Seeing the importance of the problem, the authors have made an endeavor to find the critical factors for technical institution evaluation from literature survey.Many researchers in the past have identified different factors for institution evaluation but as per authors' knowledge no literature review has been attempted in the past to collect all critical factors at a single place.A Pareto analysis has also been attempted to know the critical factor intensity in evaluating technical institution.
In this paper a total of 35 quality research papers have been reviewed to find the critical factors.To find the good papers all the leading search engines as well as renowned publishing houses such as Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Inderscience, Springer & Emerald have been searched.The remaining paper is organized as follows.Section 2 deals with identification of critical factors.Section 3 discusses pareto analysis and conclusion is provided at the end.

Identification of critical factors
Table 1 lists the critical factors with the name of the contributors.40 factors were identified but with the opinions of experts and academicians these were reduced to 23, because other factors were either similar or they seem to be less important.

22.Emphasis on training and development for all
The conference board (1993), Raisbeck (1994), Spanbauer (1995), Lozier and Teeter(1996), Boaden (1997), Owlia and Aspinwall(1997) • Identify the factors to be compared and arrange them in desired order, • Select standards for comparison or categories into which you want to group the data, • Collect data and total the occurrences in each data category, • List categories from left to right on the horizontal axis in descending order -from largest to smallest, • Draw bars representing the frequency of the items, • Calculate the cumulative frequencies and percentages, • Construct a cumulative line graph.
The factors reported by the selected articles were extracted and presented in a Table 1.The factors that were recommended by the authors for effective evaluation were included in the Pareto analysis.The Pareto analysis of factors compiled from selected articles is presented in Tables 2 and Fig. 2. Top Management has come at the top with 64% literature support while other factors occurs at only 36%.

Conclusion
Technical institution evaluation is important for stakeholders, management as well as for strong economy of India.Critical factors have been identified from literature survey and pareto analysis has been carried out to now the intensity of these factors in evaluation.The pareto analysis shows that top management is the most target factor in literature.This seems to be right because if the vision and policies of the top management are correct and in the best interest of stakeholders and institution then definitely everyone will be beneficial.The second important factors come out to be faculty which is the pillar of any good technical institution The third important factors comes out to be planning, which is another most critical factor because all depends upon building right planning in the starting and in the last infrastructural factor comes.A good infrastructure will definitely produce more opportunities to provide the class education.

Faculty•Fig. 1 .
Fig.1.Technical Institution Evaluation clusters and detailed criteria 3. Pareto analysis of critical factors for technical institution evaluation Pareto diagrams are named after Vilfredo Pareto , who studied the distribution of wealth in 19 th century Italy, that is, the number of people in various income classes.Juran (1989) extended this idea beyond the principle of wealth to problems in general.Pareto diagram are a special type of histogram, which helps determine which factors are most important and in what order they contribute.The bars in Pareto diagrams are rearranged in descending order of their heights, showing the individual contribution of each factor as well as the cumulative contributions.The purpose is to identify high priority items by separating the "vital few" from the "trivial many".The preparation of Pareto diagram follows the following steps: