Measuring Efficiency in Higher Education in Korea

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate efficiencies of private institutions of higher education in Korea. The analysis is conducted with DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) and Fama-Macbeth regression for the efficiency growth estimations. The efficiency score indicates if an institution has capacity for improvement, and we aimed to distinguish the institution samples during a specific period of time, thus the national higher education assessment provides a useful tool in evaluating the performance of the institutions. The DEA results strongly support the hypothesis that the assessment has a positive effect on conventional academic outputs such as research published and the number of student enrolled. Hence, private institutions have incentives to relay more input variables to the output. Our findings satisfy the CCR as well as BCC. Considering the ratio of total scores and the difference in scores among the institutions, grade C-group (the subgroup) shows statistically significant in efficiency improvement between the year 2010 and 2015. To sum up the result, the first assessment cycle had a positive effect on improving the overall efficiency of Korean institutions in higher education, and specifically, the improved effect can be interpreted as strong in subgroup. To discuss the endogeity, a regression method has applied for examining grade-group and efficiency growth. The findings reveal that the recent appearance of assessments of higher education institutions poses the question of the consistency of efficiency scores derived from different grades of group.