“…From the extant literature of HE studies surveyed in Worthington (2001), Liu et al (2013), De Witte and López-Torres (2017), Johnes et al (2017) and Rhaiem (2017), data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) are the most common methods used to measure HE performance in the form of efficiency-the ability to maximise (minimise) outputs (inputs) for a given set of inputs (outputs). Most recently, HE performance studies such as de Jorge Moreno et al (2019), Liu et al (2019), Zhang and Shi (2019), Agasisti et al (2020), Amara et al (2020), Bowrey and Clements (2020), Mammadova andAypay (2020), andSalas-Velasco (2020), just to name several, use the afore-mentioned frontier approaches. Most of the studies posit that HEIs use academic staff, student numbers and expenditure as inputs to produce outputs such as graduates and research publications or/ and research income.…”