An Application of DEA Methodology in Efficiency Measurement of the Czech Public Universities

The largest amount of budget of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport intended for Czech higher education institutions (HEIs) goes to the public universities and therefore we focused on the measuring their efficiency. We used data envelopment analysis, a non-parametric method, which evaluates the technical efficiency of homogenous production units. We used data for the Czech public HEIs from 2013 and determined the following variables: the academic staff and other costs as inputs and the bachelor and master's graduates and students, PhD graduates and students as outputs. We run two analyses. The first analysis compared all HEIs with each other and showed that we have to consider the specification of the HEIs. The second analysis divided HEIs into three groups with similar cost coefficients and showed that dividing HEIs into groups helped us to eliminate the high differences in inputs and in outputs and therefore we got better information about the efficiency of HEIs. For other analysis we recommend using faculties or departments with the same or similar specialization instead of the whole HEIs.