The Strategy of the Islamic Azad University in Relation to its Available Academic Fields and their Alignment with the Labor Market (Game Theory Approach)

Abstract

In our country, a large number of university graduates are unable to leverage their higher education and enter the workforce. It is evident that at present, there is no coherent qualitative and quantitative linkage between the educational system and the labor market, leading to resource wastage. Furthermore, there exists a fundamental ambiguity regarding the rationale for the significant upward trend in higher education within the country compared to global and regional trends. In this article, game theory and static games with complete information have been employed to model the interaction between the Azad university and students. To this end, the strategies of the university and students have been examined within four distinct scenarios, and their outcomes have been analyzed to ascertain the equilibrium in the aforementioned games. The results demonstrate that, for students, the strategy of pursuing studies in a field with available job opportunities that align with the student's preferences dominates over other strategies (irrespective of the choices made by other players) in all games. As for the Azad university, the strategy of offering a field with existing job prospects or establishing new ones supersedes alternative strategies, and the absence of such fields is pervasive within the university. Ultimately, it is recommended that the Azad university continues its approach if there are fields with available job opportunities, and if there are no practical fields that correspond to the region, necessary policies should be implemented to create these opportunities.

Keywords

• game theory
• static games with complete information
• azad university
• students
• nash equilibrium