DEA models as a tool for evaluating and measuring the efficiency of public universities

Abstract

Nowadays, the issue of measuring economic and non-economic efficiency is related not only to the enterprise itself but also to the organizations providing education. Measuring the economic efficiency of an educational institution cannot be done as clearly as in the case of enterprises whose mission is to produce products and services for the purpose of selling them. In the case of educational institutions in the form of public universities, profit cannot be considered as the main objective. Universities only report data stipulated by the current legislation, thus measuring efficiency is a rather challenging matter with ambiguous quantification. This study analyzes the efficiency of public universities through some publicly available indicators of their activities. The selection of indicators was made based on the analysis of previous scientific works that dealt with the issue. The basic selection criteria were whether the indicators were verifiable and unquestionable. The work focused on the construction of a model based on DEA analysis of efficiency at constant returns to scale. Descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, cluster analysis, deduction, induction, comparison, and synthesis were also used. Through these methods, it was possible to construct a general model for evaluating the efficiency of public universities.