The Efficiency of European Universities and the Role of Exogenous Factors

Abstract

The evaluation of Higher Education represents a worldwide interesting topic of discussion. Many quantitative studies regard efficiency and inefficiency measures of universities’ performance in terms of traditional Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) or of their variants: the efficiency of a specific university is given by a relation between supplied inputs such as costs, students and faculty, and produced outputs such as graduates and profit, while external influences are taken for granted. The purpose of this analysis is to measure the efficiency of public European Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) through non-parametric approaches and to consider the Conditional Frontier treatment of Daraio and Simar (2005) to test how the introduction of some potential exogenous efficiency determinants might affect the university’s productivity, namely, the proportion of women as faculty staff members, the Gross Domestic Product and the institution foundation year. We analyze a sample of 457 HEIs from 15 countries by measuring their performance during 2013. Our results suggest the proportion of women as a substitutive input that has a positive effect on the production process.