Measuring efficiency of Vietnamese public colleges: an application of the DEA‐based dynamic network approach

Abstract

In Vietnam, public colleges play a crucial role in shaping the socioeconomic and educational development strategies and providing a skilled labor force needed for the country's market-oriented economy. Using balanced panel data for 2011-2013, we use the integrated data envelopment analysis based dynamic network model to examine dynamic changes in efficiencies of public colleges in the education sector. This model allows simultaneously estimating efficiencies of financial and academic operations and the overall dynamic changes of colleges in a network structure. Our findings indicate that the overall efficiencies of colleges are, on average, 0.741 while the average efficiencies of the financial and academic operations are 0.722 and 0.760, respectively. Furthermore, the in-city colleges are more efficient than others, 0.776 and 0.728, respectively.

Input Rigidities and Performance of Vietnamese Universities

“…Sullivan et al (2012) assert that both enrolments and completions are important in labor market studies and, thus, only using one of them may miss a critical output dimension. Such outputs have been used in recent studies, such as those of Abbott and Doucouliagos (), Castano and Cabanda (,), de Franca et al (), Fernando and Cabanda (), Miranda et al (), Thanassoulis et al () and Tran and Villano (). Regarding research output, because data on publications and other measured indicators are not available, we use research‐related income as a proxy for this output, which has also been used in other studies (e.g.…”

“…Agasisti and Bianco, ; Agasisti and Pohl, ; Arjomandi et al, ), whereas others have used the input orientation to minimize input resources, given the target outputs (e.g. Castano and Cabanda, 2007; Sav, ; Duh et al, ; Tran and Villano, , ). In Vietnam, the government's objective is to get at least one university into the world's top 200 universities; thus, universities should focus on improving their performance by providing good learning facilities for students and having high‐qualified academic staff for teaching and research activities.…”

“…Among these methods, two studies, Thanassoulis (1999) and Thanassoulis et al (2011), focused on the education sector on the grounds of using super efficiency introduced by Andersen and Petersen (1993). Because of its appropriateness in the educational context, Tran and Villano (2015) opted to apply the method of Thanassoulis (1999) and Thanassoulis et al (2011) to construct a process for identifying outliers for Vietnamese colleges. In the present study, we adopted the procedure of identifying outliers as described in Tran and Villano (2015).…”

“…Because of its appropriateness in the educational context, Tran and Villano (2015) opted to apply the method of Thanassoulis (1999) and Thanassoulis et al (2011) to construct a process for identifying outliers for Vietnamese colleges. In the present study, we adopted the procedure of identifying outliers as described in Tran and Villano (2015). Details of this process are not presented here but are available in Tran and Villano (2015).…”

“…In the present study, we adopted the procedure of identifying outliers as described in Tran and Villano (2015). Details of this process are not presented here but are available in Tran and Villano (2015). A total of 16 university outliers were detected and data were adjusted to keep them on the frontier.…”