Evaluating the Effectiveness of Educational Institutions Using Frontier Analysis

The higher education system has been experimenting with management approaches to deal with challenges arising from both internal as well as external factors. In this context, it is absolutely essential to assess the quality of education offered by an educational institution with specific reference to the reliability of how and when the learning takes place. There are lots of quantitative techniques available and some work in this area has been already done. But there is a dearth of literature focusing on the relative efficiency. One advanced operations research technique which evaluates the relative efficiency is the Frontier Analysis or Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). This paper attempts to use Frontier Analysis to assess the effectiveness of educational institutions, specifically a set of selected institutions offering engineering education in Tamil Nadu, India. The research has identified a set of input and output parameters for each institution, from which the efficient frontiers (DMUs) are determined. The relative efficiency of the institutions are measured with respect to the efficient frontier and then analyzed. Detailed recommendations are set forth, for appropriate interventions to address the specific gaps identified through the gaps analysis. The analysis further provides useful information and opens up new avenues for future research.