If companies want to stand out in the competitive market environment to raise customer awareness, they must understand customers¡¦ requirements, interests, and behaviors. In the past, a company gets customers¡¦ information to support decision making by doing market survey or analyzing historical transaction data. Some researches have showed that if a company can integrate market survey and transaction data analysis, the company can get a more comprehensive and complete information about customers. Although previous researches have indicated that it is very useful for a company to make good decisions by integrating market survey and transaction data analysis, there is still little research addressing this issue in education. The study aimed to explore the relationship between information analyzed from historical transaction data and from market survey for higher education. Our research scope focuses on the PhD programs of management schools. The result shows that student performance is strongly related to department reputation. Some suggestions for departments that want to improve their reputation as follows: improving the number of research grants gained from the National Science Council, increasing the number of graduate PhD students as supervisors and increasing the number of published papers and thesis under their supervision, expanding the number of graduate PhD students applying for National Science Council grants, and promoting the percentage of graduate PhD students teaching in public universities. It is evident that education stakeholders can combine market survey and historical data analysis to get more complete information for decision making Finally, this research would also bring up some practical suggestions and promote future research.