Contribution Assessment and Comparison of High-Level Universities in the Four Bay Areas: An Analytic Network Process Approach

Higher education plays an important role in promoting regional sustainable development. Based on the Analytic Network Process (ANP) approach, this paper builds a contribution assessment model of high-level universities in the Bay area. A major advantage of ANP is that it incorporates interdependent relationships between elements. As an application, the contributions of 89 high-level universities from the four Bay areas (i.e., New York Bay area of the United States, the San Francisco Bay area of the United States, the Tokyo Bay area of Japan and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay area of China) are assessed by the ANP-based model. The results show that the New York Bay area performs the best among the four Bay areas in terms of both quality and quantity. This paper shows that the ANP approach is suitable to deal with complex decision-making problems, such as assessing the contribution of high-level universities.