Carbon Efficiency of US Colleges and Universities: A Nonparametric Assessment

Abstract

Under the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC), institutes of higher education have pledged to pursue a goal of carbon neutrality. This involves reorienting the institution’s objective function to incorporate emissions as an undesirable output as well as the desirable outputs of teaching and research which have been their prior focus. A rational first step is for institutions to identify the efficiency frontier of this new objective function and evaluate their own performance relative to it. We utilize emissions reported under the ACUPCC agreement and a nonparametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach in order to evaluate the relative performance of signatories to the agreement in terms of producing teaching and research with the least greenhouse gas emissions. We find that signatory institutions have improved their carbon efficiency since signing the agreement, and that most are now producing their desirable outputs relatively efficiently in terms of carbon emissions. We interpret this result as implying that further reductions in emissions can only be made at the cost of reducing other outputs directly or reallocating resources that might be used for desirable outputs toward reducing emissions.