Efficiency of Tertiary Education in Croatia: Reviewing Dea Applications

Abstract

Due to its impact on the quality of the human capital, and thus, the country’s economic growth, education is considered a top priority and a strategic sector in every economy. This is the reason why education is in general publicly financed by governments throughout the world. Therefore, the efficiency of tertiary education needs to be consistently evaluated and measured. The main goal of this article is to survey and present all the published studies investigating the efficiency of tertiary education in the Republic of Croatia with the application of the non-parametric methodology Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Moreover, other goals of the study are to explore their used DEA models, the selected inputs and outputs as well as their findings and recommendations. The methodology used for this research is the extensive literature review of studies that employ the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) in the efficiency evaluation of higher education in Croatia. The research approach includes a survey of the most relevant scientific databases for this research (i.e. Scopus, Web of Science – SSCI and SCI papers and the Croatian Scientific Bibliography CROSBI). The terms “Data Envelopment Analysis”, “Education” and “Croatia” were used for the data collection. After a total of 41 hits (5 in Scopus, 23 on WoS and 13 on CROSBI), a manual evaluation of the relevance and a selection has been made with the criterion of paper relevance. This ultimately led to 8 articles that investigate the relative efficiency of Croatian tertiary education. Thus, this article presents the findings of the most relevant published work regarding the efficiency of Croatian higher education and its findings are invaluable to the higher education institutions, the government, as well as academic members and the interested public.