An Analytic Hierarchical Approach to Decision Making for Selection of Engineering Colleges in Tamil Nadu

The admissions into professional colleges in Tamil Nadu have become an art of mess with increasing number of engineering colleges in the state every year. At the beginning of every academic year, the candidates applying for the Tamil Nadu engineering college counseling, face a tough decision-making situation in choosing a college from above 350 available. This paper deals with the application of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for the selection of college in a region, based on different criteria from the students’ and the parents’ point of view. It involves an analysis prioritizing the engineering colleges taken into consideration, based on the AHP process, to aid the decision maker with a confident result. An extensive study over various issues concerning the college admissions was done. Five different criteria popular among the students were posed before them for evaluating five engineering colleges in the Chennai region. At the end of the synthesization done through T L Saaty’s AHP process, the priority ranking of various colleges was obtained