Assessment and Evaluation Study of Railway Engineering Education in the Philippines using a Triple Helix-Based Framework Composite Index Approach

Rapid modernization of the Philippine railway network demands a highly skilled domestic engineering workforce, yet higher education institutions lack standardized quantitative metrics to evaluate how academic programs align with industry needs and government policies. This study assessed and evaluated the state of railway engineering education in the Philippines using a Triple Helix-based composite index approach that integrates the academic, government, and industry dimensions of an innovation ecosystem. Specifically, the investigation sought to determine the relative importance of ten Triple Helix capacity indicators and to measure the institutional performance of partner universities offering railway-related programs in Metro Manila. Using a quantitative descriptive-evaluative research design, the Analytic Hierarchy Process was employed to derive indicator weights from pairwise comparisons completed by forty-two expert respondents drawn from the academic, government, and industry sectors. Expert judgments were aggregated through the geometric mean method, validated using consistency ratios, and combined with MinMax normalized institutional data and General Appropriations Act funding records to compute composite index scores. Results revealed that the academic dimension carried the highest priority weight at 72.24%, followed by the government dimension at 19.03% and the industry dimension at 8.73%, with all comparison matrices satisfying the consistency threshold below 0.10. Globally, specialized railway engineering courses emerged as the single most critical indicator at 33.56%, followed by faculty lecturers at 15.71% and student enrollment and graduates at 14.48%. Composite index scores ranked the Polytechnic University of the Philippines first at 0.8433, FEATI University second at 0.6928, and the Technological Institute of the Philippines third at 0.2218, confirming that a specialized railway curriculum supported by qualified faculty, government partnerships, and sustained industry linkages drives institutional readiness.