The Efficiency of Public and Private Higher Education Institutions in Poland

Changes introduced to Poland’s education system in 2011 and 2014 amid efforts to adjust it to the needs of the labour market had an effect on the country’s institutions of higher learning. This paper provides an analysis of the efficiency of public and private Polish universities and examines the impact of selected factors in the years that followed. To estimate this efficiency, a Banker, Charnes and Cooper (BCC) model of the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method was used. To gauge the impact of environmental variables on the efficiency of universities, a truncated regression analysis was performed. The results of the study indicate that public universities were more efficient in terms of the number of graduates they produced but less efficient when considering the level of graduate salaries. The opposite was true for private institutions. The level of efficiency was affected by variables related to specific universities and the socio-economic situation of the region in which they operate. The study analyses the efficiency of educational activities of public and private universities, both in terms of the number of graduates and the quality of education and in the context of the labour market. The analysis also considers the level of graduate earnings.