Assessing the Efficiency of Public Universities through DEA. A Case Study

[EN] This paper presents the results of an efficiency study of Colombian public universities in 2012, conducted using the methodology of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and the models CCR, BCC and SBM under output orientation. The main objective is to determine technical, pure technical, scale and mix efficiencies using data acquired from the Ministry of National Education. An analysis of the results shows the extent to which outputs of inefficient Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) could be improved and the possible cause of this inefficiency. The universities were also ranked using a Pareto efficient cross-efficiency model and a study was made of changes to overall productivity between 2011 and 2012. The results showed Tolima, Caldas and UNAD to be the best-performing universities, with Universidad del Pacífico as the worst performer. Malmquist index was applied to analyze the change in productivity from 2011 to 2012. The Universidad de La Guajira showed great improvement in technical efficiency between 2011 and 2012.Monica Martinez-Gomez has been funded by the research project GVA/20161004: Project of Conselleria d'Educacio, Investigacio, Cultura i Esport de la Generalitat Valenciana, through the project "Validacion de la competencia transversal de innovacion mediante un modelo de Medida formativo"Visbal-Cadavid, D.; Martínez-Gómez, M.; Guijarro, F. (2017). Assessing the Efficiency of Public Universities through DEA. A Case Study. Sustainability. 9(8):1-19. https://doi.org/10.3390/su9081416S11998Bayraktar, E., Tatoglu, E., & Zaim, S. (2013). Measuring the relative efficiency of quality management practices in Turkish public and private universities. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 64(12), 1810-1830. doi:10.1057/jors.2013.2Mayston, D. J. (2017). Convexity, quality and efficiency in education. 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Operational Research in Education

Operational Research (OR) techniques have been applied, from the early stages of the discipline, to a wide variety of issues in education. At the government level, these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the individual sectors of education and the institutions within the sectors. Another pertinent issue concerns the efficient operation of institutions, how to measure it, and whether resource allocation can be used to incentivise efficiency savings. Local governments, as well as being concerned with issues of resource allocation, may also need to make decisions regarding, for example, the creation and location of new institutions or closure of existing ones, as well as the day-to-day logistics of getting pupils to schools. Issues of concern for managers within schools and colleges include allocating the budgets, scheduling lessons and the assignment of students to courses. This survey provides an overview of the diverse problems faced by government, managers and consumers of education, and the OR techniques which have typically been applied in an effort to improve operations and provide solutions

PERFORMANCE OF BRAZILIAN BUSINESS, ACCOUNTING AND TOURISM GRADUATE PROGRAMS

The Brazilian institution in charge of graduate programs (CAPES) evaluates all programs every three years, focusing on publications in scientific periodicals, which are classified by the Qualis – CAPES system. This study aims to measure the relative efficiency of post-graduate programs in Business, Accounting and Tourism through Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and to measure the change in productivity from the three-year period of 2004-2006 to the 2007-2009 period by the Malmquist Index. Efficiencies of some graduate programs in Brazil using DEA have been evaluated but the Malmquist Index was not used because the 2007-2009 data was only recently available. They also used different input and output variables and did not consider, in our view, the real importance CAPES attributes to publications. We used, as inputs, professors, dissertations and thesis and, as outputs, total points obtained from the Qualis classification of periodicals. Among the results: the efficiency increased from the first to the second period; the efficiency of public institutions was higher as was the efficiency of programs with PhD courses and of programs more than 12 years old; the Malmquist index increased from one triennium to another

An application of statistical interference in DEA models: An analysis of public owned university departments' efficiency

This paper uses Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model formulations in order to determine the performance levels of 16 departments of the University of Thessaly. Particularly, the constant returns to scale (CRS) and variable returns to scale (VRS) models have been applied alongside with bootstrap techniques in order to determine accurate performance measurements of the 16 departments. The study illustrates how the recent developments in efficiency analysis and statistical inference can be applied when evaluating institutional performance issues. The paper provides the efficient departments and the target values which need to be adopted from the inefficient departments in order to operate in the most productive scale size (MPSS). Moreover it provides bias corrected estimates alongside with their confidence intervals. The analysis indicates that there are strong inefficiencies among the departments, emphasizing the misallocation of resources or/and inefficient application of departments policy developments.University efficiency; DEA; Bootstrap techniques; Kernel density estimation, Economic research; Europe; University rankings.

Assessing the Relative Performance of University Departments: Teaching vs. Research

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is known as a non-parametric method to evaluate the relative efficiencies of a set of homogenous decision-making units (DMUs) (i.e., banking, health, education, etc.) that use multiple inputs to produce multiple outputs. DEA models also have applications for universities or specifically, departments of a university. In practice, determining input and output measures may be based on the available data. However, lack of defining an important measure or use of invalid data may mislead the decision maker. Therefore, this study aims to assess the affect of missing values such as by discarding of outputs on DMU’s efficiency values. The up-to-date data for the departments of an engineering faculty are considered and their performances are presented based on teaching and research oriented measures.Data Envelopment Analysis, Higher Education, University Departments, Teaching, Research