Planning for Higher education like other planning activities is an important taskfor eachcountry. Theplans should be prioritized,so we need a rule-based process which doesnot take so long and it could be able to use more expert ideas. On the other hand it should simultaneously simplify the problem complexity and provides appraisable results. In this thesis a combination of the "exploratory factor analysis" method and "strategic planning" is used in order to achieve such rule-based process for formulating and evaluation of strategies. This framework makes it possible to recognize and extract valid strategies by reduction in SWOT matrix dimensions and creating statistical linkages between internal and external factors. This method is less complex than AHP or ANP methods. Moreover it overcomes the problems which may occur during evaluation of internal and external environment because of data overlapping. The proposed approach is implemented in state universities subsystem in Isfahan province. The results show factorSWOT matrix dimensions decreased to one-tenth of point SWOT matrix and instead of investigating the whole cells of matrix, seven valid strategies were extracted. The selected strategies covered all the subsystem objectives and were prioritized based on new index. This index contains two elements: first, the factor scores measured by factor analysis approach, and second the correlation between cross factors