It has an important practical significance to assess the higher vocational education development level in one specific region, but few effective methods are reported in the literature. Based on the practical challenges, we propose a fuzzy TOPSIS (Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) for assessing higher vocational education development levels. Firstly, in order to deal with decision-makers’ preferences on interval numbers, we develop a preference-based fuzzy number comparison method and then integrate it with the classic TOPSIS method to formulate a fuzzy TOPSIS method. An application example shows the effectiveness of the work and observes the impact of decision-makers’ preferences on the assessment results. Several insights are also found to improve the assessment process in the real world.
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