Measuring the efficiency of university departments: an empirical study using data envelopment analysis and cluster analysis

Universities continue to play a key role in the development of a country. As university income streams shift away from government and as the income from admissions decline under the sub-replacement fertility phenomenon, the efficiency of resource utilization has become an important issue for university administrators. This paper applies data envelopment analysis (DEA) and the concept of an assurance region to evaluate the relative efficiency (including aggregate, technical, and scale efficiencies) of academic departments at National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan. The input factors considered are personnel (expressed in the number of faculty-equivalent persons), operating expenses, and floor area, and the output factors are teaching (expressed in total credit hours), publications (expressed in the number of papers), and external grants. Notably, teaching quality is included by considering the classroom capacity in calculating credit hours, and publication quality is included by considering the author contribution to calculate the single-author-equivalent numbers of papers. In addition, a cluster analysis based on the efficiency decomposition to the contributions of the three outputs is applied to classify the departments into three groups. The results of this paper not only provide the department head with the relative efficiency and improvement directions for the department but also serve as a reference for resource allocation and future strategy development for the university administration.