Abstract
Due to the increase in students' number and the emergence of new activities, the efficiency of higher education institutions (HEIs) in Tunisia is receiving increasing attention in the academic as well as in the public discourse. In this paper, data envelopment analysis (DEA) was used to analyse the relative efficiency of 62 Tunisian HEIs for the academic year 2010-2011. The total number of HEIs was divided into two subsets - experimental group composed of 30 institutions and non-experimental group containing 32 - in order to minimise heterogeneity in the sample. The findings show that the technical and scale efficiency in the HEIs sample appear to be high on average. There were also small slacks in input utilisation. Also, more HEIs were operating at decreasing returns to scale, indicating a potential to downsize. DEA identifies the reference groups for inefficient institutions and indicates the direction of desirable productivity improvements. As such, the results obtained by DEA can serve as a benchmarking instrument for the leaders of the university system and contribute in more efficient allocation of scarce resources. Policy makers could distribute a share of budget according to institution performance and creating an atmosphere of competition in the Tunisian higher education system.
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