The Efficiency of the Higher Education in the Selected OECD Countries

There are only a few studies about measuring the efficiency of higher education in international framework. In this paper we focus on this issue. We used DEA methodology and data from OECD database for 31 countries to measure the efficiency of their higher education. All data refer to the year 2011. We constructed two models with following variables: public expenditure on higher education as percentage of total public expenditure and public expenditure on higher education as a percentage of GDP as the inputs; percentage of the population that has attained higher education and employment rate with higher education as the outputs. We defined countries with efficient higher education (e.g. Canada, Israel, Japan, Sweden) and countries with inefficient higher education (e.g. Turkey, Korea) and calculated how much the countries with inefficient higher education should change the outputs to become efficient. Our results also showed that the proportion of public and private expenditure does not affect the efficiency score.