Measuring efficiency of faculties in a public University using hierarchical network data envelopment analysis

• Main Authors: Kamarudin, Norbaizura, Rahmat, Amirah, Yusop, Noorezatty Mohd, Januri, Siti Sarah
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Collaboration; Colleges & universities; Cooperation; Data analysis; Data envelopment analysis; Decision making; Efficiency; Higher education; Higher education institutions; Measuring instruments; Performance measurement
• ISSN: 0094-243X; 1551-7616
• DOI: 10.1063/5.0137082

Higher education (HE) plays an important role in human daily life which can create great opportunities for an individual’s growth, social revolution, and national development. Additionally, measuring the performance of the HE sector is essential in improving the quality of teaching, research and services as it is the major function of universities. At the present, Ministry of Education (MOE) has its own performance measurement like MyRA, SETARA and MyQUEST, but each of these instruments measure from a different perspective. Therefore, a more appropriate technique is needed to complement the existing measurement. Measuring the relative efficiency by computing the ratio of weighted output to weighted input of each decision making units (DMUs) helps in assessing and comparing the performance of peer DMUs. A lot of literatures on efficiency analysis at higher education institutions or universities used Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method for calculating the relative efficiency of multiple similar DMUs. However, this method ignores the internal structure of the system. Hence, this study applied the hierarchical network data envelopment analysis (NDEA) to measure relative efficiency of 17 faculties in one of the public universities in Malaysia based on data collected for year 2018. By using hierarchical NDEA, the result revealed that none of the faculties is efficient since its functions or components were found to be inefficient. Average hierarchical NDEA indicated that the most inefficient function in Science and Technology, and Business and Management cluster is the number of collaboration activities done under MoU/LoI. Meanwhile, Social Science and Humanities showed low average score in multiple outputs which are the number of graduates from undergraduate program, number of graduates from PhD program, number of expert lecturers and number of collaboration activities done under MoU/LoI. Nevertheless, the results are more informative compared to conventional DEA and this will help the management of university faculties to identify inefficient functions and plan to improve the overall performance of university.