Towards a Composite index for measuring the higher education institutions in Egypt

Abstract

Egypt has the largest and most significant higher education system in the Middle East and North Africa but it had been continuously facing serious and accumulated challenges.The gap between what is existing and what is supposed to be for the self-regulation and improvement processes is not entirely clear to face these challenges. The effective use of information technology in higher education requires good and new techniques as well as rational strategies. The reform of higher education through strategies based on data analysis of current situation will affect the overall performance of transitional state and will shape new paradigms in higher education system development in Egypt. This research has objective to develop a model of Composite index (CI) based on a set of key performance indicators (KPI) commensurate with the nature of higher education institutions inEgypt. The outcomes of the composite index aim to measure overall performance of institutions and provide unified ranking method in this context. KPIs are determined as description of key success factors related to institutions sustainability. These KPIs are classified into main areas and sub-indicators. Within this scope, the indicators were weighted via Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method according to their significance levels. Pairwise comparison survey template and database web application were developed to collect narrative responses, apply algorithm and extract results. The research study was conducted with 40 professors from 19 renowned universities in Egypt as education experts. The status of composite index model implementation is discussed from theoretical and technical perspectives.

Building a measurement system of higher education performance: evidence from a Latin-American country

“…The three universities' missionary functions shape the academic subsystem: education, research (Asif and Searcy, 2014b; Wang, 2010) and extension (Gough and Scott, 2008; Lewis et al ., 2007). The administrative subsystem, seen as management operations, include the performance of resources and internationalisation (Ballard, 2013; El-Hefnawy et al , 2014). Resources performance consists not only of the financial and human resources component (Wang, 2010) but of all the support services for the fulfilment of the missional functions.…”

A comprehensive model for evaluating the performance of universities

“…Brief reviews of PM and organizational theories still have not solved the problem of what scholars might be looking at. A widely accepted performance measurement definition is of El-Hefnawy et al (2014) which is the process of quantifying the efficiency and effectiveness of actions. The measurements are expected to be multi-dimensional, which depends on how people interpret the "efficiencies".…”

“…Another disadvantage in the measurement might be lack of time based concern. The h index depends on the accumulation of an author's publications and citations over time (El-Hefnawy, 2014). The longer an author works the larger h index he or she may have accumulated.…”

“…The CUC report (2006) and University of Edinburgh provide some financial indicators that include operating cost recovery, surplus/deficit as % of income and current ratio. Besides, ratios such as administrative cost per FTE student, utilities and maintenance cost per FTE student and other expenditures per FTE student are also used in the measurement of cost varieties in universities (El-Hefnawy et al 2014).…”

“…The relation between human resource management and organizational performance has well been examined in human resource literatures (El-Hefnawy, 2014, Jeong, 2014. However, the systematic performance measurement on human resource might be very rare at this moment.…”