Developing Academic Soft Skills in Higher Education: The Role of Communication, Critical Thinking, and Creativity

This study develops and validates a multicriteria decision-making framework for assessing the structure and development of academic soft skills in higher education. A total of 241 undergraduate students (104 first-year and 137 final-year) participated in the study. We operationalized soft skills—communication, creativity, and critical thinking—through 15 subcriteria derived from validated instruments, applied objective weighting methods to determine the relative importance of subcriteria, and used K-means clustering to identify structural groupings. Results indicated consistent dominance of communication-related criteria across weighting methods and increased structural differentiation of soft skills in final-year students. Clustering analysis revealed a transition from generalized skill groupings in early academic stages to more specialized and integrated clusters in later stages. The proposed framework enables systematic comparison of soft skill structures and provides a reproducible approach for analyzing their development in higher education.