Abstract
The higher education system of Viet Nam has been undergoing reform process with the aim of seeking a position in the world’s education market. However, recent changes in the system have made the operational efficiency of the system less stable, thus making it more challenging to improve the country’s universities world rankings. In this paper, we investigate the performance of tertiary education institutions in Viet Nam and evaluate the efficiency gap between colleges and universities. Using the metafrontier directional technology approach, we estimate both the group frontier and metafrontier efficiencies for 112 universities and 141 colleges using data for 2011–2013 and compute their differences imposed by the technology associated with different levels of ownership and locations. The findings showed that the performance of universities were better than that of colleges, at 0.837 0.774, respectively. However, under an unrestricted metafrontier framework, the metatechnology ratios suggest that universities and colleges were operated comparatively well by potentially increasing their performance by 7.8 and 5.0 per cent, respectively. Both urban universities and colleges are found to be more efficient than their rural counterparts, but the effects of ownerships showed mixed results on the performance of universities and colleges. Our results highlight the need for appropriate policies and enabling environment that will enhance the performance of each institution. It is imperative to re-evaluate the specific role and individual contributions of colleges and universities in the national education system and assist rural universities and colleges to explore their full potential to enhance their performance.
Highlights
The efficiency of the higher education sector has been one of the central themes of many studies because of its importance in socio-economic development
Most studies have been implemented to measure the operational efficiency of universities and college only focused on individual performance of universities and colleges without consideration of their performance under an unrestricted framework
This paper aims to fill this gap by providing insights about technological heterogeneity and the efficiencies of the Vietnamese universities and colleges under the overarching teaching technology for the three years, 2011–2013
Summary
The efficiency of the higher education sector has been one of the central themes of many studies because of its importance in socio-economic development. Performance of the higher education sector is a crucial indicator for enhancing the competitive ability of a nation. It can be seen that Vietnam has achieved great achievements in implementing its reform policy in terms of remarkable economic growth and a significant improvement in social welfare. This impressive performance has been highly recognized by the international community (Glewwe, 2004; Nguyen & Tran, 2009)
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