Higher Education Efficiency Frontier Analysis: A Review of Variables to Consider

Abstract

The measurement of efficiency in higher education has gained a growing interest in recent years, especially due to the expansion of the university system. This paper provides a review of the literature on efficiency in higher education institutions by covering empirical articles which applied frontier efficiency measurement techniques from 1997 to 2019. We review the methodological approaches used, both parametric and non-parametric techniques, such as Data Envelopment Analysis, Malmquist index and Stochastic Frontier Analysis. Secondly, we list the applied inputs, input prices, outputs, quality, and environment variables and based on the overview, we discuss the advantages and drawbacks of the different empirical proxy variables used. We address the importance of characterizing students and research funding as raw materials of both the teaching and research services, respectively, and we provide suggestions on how to deal with them empirically. We also discuss the difference between quality and environmental variables, and we give some practical indications to distinguish them in doubtful cases.

The Productive Efficiency of Science and Technology Worldwide: A Frontier Analysis

“…When measuring research productivity, as recommends the specifications for the exercise must also include the publication period and the ''citation window'' (to address the already mentioned time lag of publications and the so called shelf life of papers, see Ferro and D'Elia (2020)). The "publication window", again according refers both to the date of a paper's original submission to a journal to its date of acceptance, and then from acceptance to its actual publication.…”

“…However, certain frontier techniques, as those here presented offer a reasonable trade-off between deepness of the analysis and loss of simplicity. An efficiency assessment helps identify typologies of knowledge generation in different countries and provides policy and managerial implications for each case, as well as detecting best-practices to identify benchmarks and discover weaknesses (Ferro and D'Elia, 2020). Thus, it is possible to evaluate whether some policy or line of incentives to research had some impact, such as budgetary funds allocated to certain goals or rewards and disincentives to certain practices.…”

Efficiency of Public and Private Service Delivery: The Case of Secondary Education

“…Meričková et al (2020) dealt with measuring and evaluating of the performance of secondary education in the Slovak Republic and proposed possible performance indicators in terms of public grammar schools. Also other authors (Ferro and D'Elia, 2020;De La Hoz, Zuluaga and Mendoza, 2021) address the question of measuring efficiency in education from a variety of perspectives. Cordero-Ferrera, Pedraja-Chaparro and Salinas-Jimenez (2008) focused on different possibilities of measuring efficiency in the education sector, aiming to define the most appropriate model for the evaluation of schools.…”

Study of the System of Scientific and Scientific-Technical Activities of Agrarian and Economic Universities

“…In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in measuring the effectiveness of university education, especially in connection with the expansion of the university system. Among the most important assessment criteria of university education are both the characteristics of students and funding of research, which become primary material for teaching and providing research services [16]. Therefore, the scientific activity of universities is one of the priority areas of their development, which is of particular importance in modern conditions of tough competition in the market for the provision of educational and research services.…”