Efficiency analysis of public higher education institutions in Turkey with parametric and non-parametric approaches

Although the number of researches measuring the efficiencies of higher education institutions has grown especially for the last two decades, literature of both parametric and non-parametric research on HEIs in Turkey is relatively scant compared to the countries alike. This PhD research that fills this noticeable gap in the literature scrutinises 53 public universities in Turkey between the full academic year of 2005-2006 and 2009-2010 covering 5-year time span. In this research, albeit the slight changes in the non-parametric estimation, number of undergraduate students, postgraduate students and research funding are taken as outputs, capital and labour expenses as input prices and eventually annual expenses as total cost. Moreover, university-based features are included into the model so as to apprehend potential heterogeneities among the universities. The initial conclusions coming out of parametric estimation have certain suggestions for public HEIs in Turkey. Firstly, mean efficiency performances of Turkish public universities are fairly dispersed ranging from 70% to 90%. This would encourage a new set of policy-making decisions to lead inefficient universities to be aware of the success of their counterparts. Secondly, despite the fact that some universities have relatively poor efficiency rates, in overall analysis their efficiency scores are indicating optimistic signs relying on certain models. Lastly, developing different models do matter for efficiency analysis in the sense that dispersion of efficiency values among Turkish universities does vary from one model to another