Efficiency evaluation of graduation process in Australian public universities

Abstract

First-year attrition and on-time graduation are key challenges for contemporary universities, which determine their efficiency. Based on the benefit of the doubt approach, this study reports the efficiency of the graduation process in 37 Australian public universities. The super-efficiency model extended by restrictions on virtual weights is used. The proposed model considers the attrition rate and the on-time graduation rate separately for domestic and overseas students and other variables, like student-staff ratio, the share of full-time students and the share of online students. Some additional factors are included, such as the university's affiliation with a grouping, the year of the university founding and basic data on the subject mix of universities courses, explaining the rankings created. The analysis indicates that research-oriented universities achieve better results and overseas students perform better than domestic ones. Also, it can be seen that the universities dealing with large-scale online learning are underperformed. The obtained results allow all stakeholders to understand better the efficiency of the graduation process. The main findings are consistent with research published elsewhere.