Parametric and Non Parametric Methods for Efficiency Assessment of State Higher Vocational Schools in 2009-2011

Abstract

Objective: As a great number of higher schools in Poland are financed from public resources, there arises a question about the adequacy of those schools' inputs to the obtained outputs. The aim of this paper is to examine the technical efficiency of 27 state higher vocational schools in Poland.

Research Design&Methods: The research was conducted for the years 2009-2011. There was applied the Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA) as well as the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The second one was calculated both for Constant Returns to Scale (CRS) and for Variable Returns to Scale (VRS).

Findings: A majority of studied schools, found as inefficient in the analysis conducted with the DEA method with CRS models, are found to be efficient in VRS models, demonstrate a relatively lower efficiency when calculated with the SFA method.

Implications & Recommendations: For efficiency evaluation of higher education institutions there should be applied models of VRS. It enables identifying the units that despite operating in a different scale are fully efficient. The size and scale of operations may have a significant impact on the efficiency of conducted activity by higher education institutions.

Contribution & Value Added: The work compares two methods (parametric and non parametric) for evaluation of technical efficiency that are present in subject literature (SFA is less popular) but are rarely evaluated and compared for its applicability to the higher education sector.

Article type:

research paper

Keywords:

SFA; DEA; efficiency; higher education

JEL codes:

I23, C14

Keywords

SFA, DEA, efficiency, higher education

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