Ammar Y. Alqahtani

Universities worldwide strive to achieve excellence in research, learning, teaching, and community services, which are the pillars of their strategic plans. However, satisfying international ranking criteria might not directly result in achieving their strategic objectives. This paper proposes a new approach to rank university colleges by evaluating their educational quality. Standard sets of criteria from multiple international university ranking systems and a university’s strategic plan’s Balanced Scorecard perspectives were cross-mapped for the evaluation. A new multi-criteria decision-making-based framework was applied to six colleges of a non-profit university in the Middle East. It revealed their performance rankings and contributions to the university’s educational quality objectives. This paper offers a novel approach for universities to develop strategies that satisfy multiple international ranking systems while achieving their strategic goals concurrently and as per their priorities. Implications include informing university leaders on the most contributing colleges and assisting in pinpointing quality shortcomings and their causes. This helps universities design better performance indicators and allocate resources to achieve educational excellence. This paper puts forward a new approach for universities to unify their efforts in satisfying the requirements of multiple international ranking systems while achieving their strategic goals.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the financial performance of companies in different sectors. One of the most important sectors affected is the energy sector. Therefore, this research study aims to conduct a financial performance evaluation of companies in the Saudi energy sector in 2019, 2020, and 2021. This is to capture and analyze the effect on companies before, during, and post the COVID-19 pandemic, respectively. A hybrid multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) approach is followed to achieve the objective. The financial performance evaluation of energy companies is based on four financial dimensions and 11 performance indicators. Results revealed that energy companies’ efficiency and profitability were relatively the most important dimensions, followed by leverage and liquidity. Furthermore, results revealed the relative importance of the indicators from the most to the least important. Results also revealed the effect of COVID-19 on energy companies’ financial performance, demonstrating the change over the three years. Implications include providing insights for energy companies on the financial dimensions and indicators to be maintained and monitored in the case of pandemics. Furthermore, to assist decision-makers in the energy sector in developing strategies to mitigate financial performance disparities during and post-pandemics.