Usage of machine learning for strategic decision making at Higher Educational Institutions

Abstract

Decisions made at the strategic level of Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) affect policies, strategies, and actions that the institutions make as a whole. Decision's structures at HEIs are depicted in this paper and their effectiveness in supporting the institution's governance. The disengagement of the stakeholders and the lack of using efficient computational algorithms lead to 1) the decision process takes longer; 2) the "whole picture" is not involved along with all data necessary; and 3) small academic impact is produced by the decision, among others. Machine learning is an emerging field of artificial intelligence that using various algorithms analyzes information and provides a richer understanding of the data contained in a specific context. Based on the author's previous works, we focus on supporting decision-making at a strategic level, being deans' concerns the preeminent mission to bolster. In this paper, three supervised classification algorithms are deployed to predict graduation rates from real data about undergraduate engineering students in South America. The analysis of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and accuracy are executed as measures of effectiveness to compare and evaluate decision tree, logistic regression, and random forest, where this last one demonstrates the best outcomes.