Designing Decision Support System for Midwifery Students’ Tuition Fees Problem

Abstract

Education is an essential need and an important element to create a broad-minded youth. While in
Indonesia, the rate of tuition fees is still imbalanced with the economic rate. Thus, many people
decided to discontinue their higher education. Decision making plays an important role to manage
organizations, including in educational institutions, as one of the main duties in managerial is making
decisions. This study took place in a midwifery academy in Malang. In response to this situation, the
academy has a policy to alleviate students by paying the tuition fees in instalments. However, many
students are in arrears as the result of this policy. Thus, management needs to take some consideration
before making a decision toward the problem. Those considerations require high accuracy and time
consuming to process information that support decision making. Currently, the decision-making
process in this academy is still semi-automated, in which some processes are still done manually,
which affect longer time to make decisions, and the accuracy of calculations could not be fully
guaranteed. According to this condition, the purpose of this research is to design a decision support
system that enables us to process information for decision making and to offer decision alternatives
for decision makers. This research employs Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) with a decision
table as a method to create decision alternatives. The prototype was developed using Visual Studio
C#.Net. The result shows that by using the proposed prototype of DSS, decision makers can reduce
5-10 minutes of decision making process compared to the old semi-automated system which still
required manual calculation and data collection and analysis before making the decision. A complete
data and more detailed parameters for decision criteria are required to implement the proposed
prototype of DSS in the institution with more objective consideration in the decision making process
as the future work.