Evaluation of Chinese higher education by TOPSIS and IEW - The case of 68 universities belonging to the Ministry of Education in China

- We adopt TOPSIS combined with IEW to investigate the overall performance of 68 Chinese MOE universities.
- The development ability reflecting long-term performance largely determines the overall performance of universities.
- Chinese universities generally are of low efficiency.
- Fiscal expenditure doesn't influence performance of Chinese universities significantly.
- Obvious superiority and inferiority exist in Chinese universities.

This study uses techniques for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) combined with information entropy weight (IEW), to investigate the performance of 68 Chinese universities belonging to the Ministry of Education (MOE) from 2002 to 2011. Assessments in teaching & research, and development ability reflect the short-term and long-term performance respectively. Development ability, consisting of human & physical capital, is an essential determinant, which is hardly found in the former evaluation. The performance of universities suggests that current fiscal expenditure allocation mechanism on Chinese universities is unreasonable, and Chinese higher education as a whole is inefficient. Furthermore, the performance of universities within the eastern region is better than the universities within the central and western regions, and that of the comprehensive universities is better than most specialist universities. Research and development ability largely determine the overall performance of universities. And the superiority and inferiority still co-exist in Chinese universities.