* Corresponding author. Tel: +989126980426 E-mail addresses: gambhirvictor@hotmail.com (V. Gambhir) © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved. doi: 10.5267/j.msl.2012.04.018 Management Science Letters 2 (2012) 1701–1706 Contents lists available at GrowingScience Management Science Letters homepage: www.GrowingScience.com/msl Pareto analysis of critical factors affecting technical institution evaluation Victor Gambhir a* , N.C. Wadhwa b and Sandeep Grover b a Manav Rachna International University, India b YMCA University of Science & Technology, Faridabad, India A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T Article history: Received December 20, 2011 Received in Revised form March, 25, 2012 Accepted 23 April 2012 Available online April 27 2012 With the change of education policy in 1991, more and more technical institutions are being set up in India. Some of these institutions provide quality education, but others are merely concentrating on quantity. These stakeholders are in a state of confusion about decision to select the best institute for their higher educational studies. Although various agencies including print media provide ranking of these institutions every year, but their results are controversial and biased. In this paper, the authors have made an endeavor to find the critical factors for technical institution evaluation from literature survey. A Pareto analysis has also been performed to find the intensity of these critical factors in evaluation. This will not only help the stake holders in taking right decisions but will also help the management of institutions in benchmarking for identifying the most important critical areas to improve the existing system. This will in turn help Indian economy. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Critical factors Technical institution evaluation Pareto analysis 1. Introduction Over the recent years, technical education in India has gone through rapid, radical and even revolutionary changes. This has generated opportunities to open technical institutions with business orientation. Thousands of technical institutions have come into existence since 1992 in India. Some of these institutions are very good and have realized the importance of quality but there are many insitituations with low level of required educational requirenments. So students are in a great confusion to select the best institution for their higher studies. Every year entrance exams are conducted in India and students have a lot of options in terms of institution according to their ranking. Although many agencies provide ranking of the institutions every year but these ranking are contradictory and instead of solving the problem, alleviate it. Moreover these rankings seem to be influenced or biased. An engineer with the thorough knowledge places a great role in Indian economy than to an engineer holding just a graduate degree. Even the technical institutions themselves want to be benchmark with the peers for improvement. So the problem of technical