Comparative Departmental Efficiency Analysis within a University: A DEA Approach

Universities play an active and important role in the development of a country. They are centers for generating ideas and knowledge which relates to the development of a country's economy as well as the quality life of its citizens. For public universities, their funds come from the taxpayers contributions; hence the accountability generally must always be assured. The question on how efficient the resources are utilized in a public university then has become an important issue. However, it is a challenging task to measure relative efficiency of universities due to the fact that universities are complex organizations that utilize multiple inputs to produce multiple outputs. This paper illustrates the application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to measure relative efficiency of twenty two academic departments of a public university in Malaysia using data collected for the year 2011. The input and output variables used in this study are those contributing to teaching/learning and research performance. The input variables considered are number of academic staff, number of non-academic staff and yearly operating expenses while the output variables are number of graduates for the year, total amount of research grant received for that year and number of academic publications by faculty members. To investigate the performance of departments with different dimensions, four models with different input-output combinations are defined. Sensitivity analysis performed suggests that different combinations of input-output yield different efficiency scores. Furthermore, when all outputs are included, the social science based departments on average perform better than the science based departments.