The selection of elective courses, which best fits the student's personal choice, becomes a challenge, considering the variety of courses available at the higher education level. The traditional recommendation approach often uses collaborative filtering along with sequential pattern mining. Existing recommender systems also use ontology. However, these approaches have several limitations, including lack of availability of ratings at higher education level and lack of personalization based on student attributes. The proposed system intends to overcome these limitations by firstly extracting student personality and profile attributes and thereby generating a set of similar users by utilizing the versatile ontology. Secondly, it predicts courses based on a well-performing sequence prediction algorithm, the compact prediction tree (CPT). The results show that the proposed approach increases the accuracy in terms of precision to a tune of 0.97 and F1 measure to a tune of 0.58 when compared with existing systems which makes the proposed method more suitable for recommending courses. © 2021 IGI Global. All rights reserved.