Matching and Ranking Trustworthy Context-Dependent Universities: A Case Study of the King Abdullah Scholarship Program

The King Abdullah Scholarship Program was created in 2005 by sending Saudi students to study abroad. The program has a series of specific rules and it was found that due to the multitude of services the students can choose from, there is a great difficulty in finding the most suitable universities/programs/courses. Traditional manual selection requires students to visit every university website looking for their preferred courses. Some students prefer to talk to advisers and recruiters to get help. Students are not aware that those advisers and recruiters might have a financial interest to direct students to certain universities. Therefore, the risk of applying to the wrong institution is increased. Manually selecting what is best for each criterion is a tedious task, and, consequently, in this work the authors use an automated system to reach a plausible solution.