Psychological capital matters: a methodological proof-of-concept for dual-dimensional student competitiveness assessment.

Introduction: In the contemporary era of boundaryless careers and Industry 5.0, sustainable employability refers not only to obtaining an initial job but also to maintaining and developing meaningful employment through adaptable human, social, and psychological resources. Traditional evaluation systems in higher education continue to rely heavily on visible cognitive signals such as cumulative grade point average (CGPA), thereby creating a hard-skill bias and leaving psychosocial resources weakly signaled. This study proposes a Balanced Weight-Constrained Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (BW-FAHP) as a methodological proof-of-concept for dual-dimensional student competitiveness assessment. Methods: The publicly available Kaggle campus-placement dataset ( Results: Imposing a transparent equilibrium between cognitive-academic and psychosocial-behavioral indicators changed candidate rankings relative to a GPA-centric benchmark and revealed a potentially overlooked high-potential profile characterized by average academic scores but strong behavioral resources. The balanced score also showed stronger alignment with the simulated placement criterion than the GPA-centric benchmark. Discussion: The stronger alignment should be interpreted as internal criterion alignment under the stated simulation assumptions rather than as evidence of real-world predictive superiority. The study provides a transparent and reproducible framework for making soft-skill assumptions explicit and offers a foundation for future validation using primary longitudinal data, validated psychosocial measures, and formal expert elicitation.