Which Universities Use Their Spaces Efficiently? Efficiency Analysis of the Public University in Turkey

The young population is quite high as the birth rate in our country is higher than in other countries. The high number of young people increases the demand for higher education and as a result of this demand, universities gain importance. Thus, the number of universities constituting the educational infrastructure of our country has increased rapidly in recent years. Therefore, it caused that increased the number of newly opened departments and quotas depending on the number of universities. In the face of rapid growth, public investment demands of universities to solve the infrastructure problem have also increased. Despite the establishment of new buildings and classrooms built in the campuses created to fill the quotas, 71 thousand quotas remained empty in 2019. Thus, public resources were used inefficiently due to the fact that the envisaged public investments could not be utilized to the maximum. In this study, the places of the 125 state universities in Turkey were analyzed whether used efficiently. The number of buildings, the number of campuses, and the size of the indoor space they used were taken into consideration for this purpose. In addition, universities were grouped and evaluated according to the provinces where they were located and the years they were founded. While there was no significant difference between the groups according to CCR scores, it was concluded that there was a significant difference between the groups according to BCC scores. The test results show that there is a 5% significance difference between 32 universities established between 2006-2007 and 27 universities established until 1982 and 26 universities established between 1987-1994. The findings show that most of the universities allocated in 2018 use public resources efficiently. Furthermore, this study provides recommendations to decision-makers in evaluating new public investment demands.