An application of DEA based Malmquist productivity index in university performance analysis

Measuring relative efficiency of various universities has been a subject for years. In fact, when there is a growing competition among educational units, it is important to find facts on each university for making managerial decisions. In this paper, we present an empirical study to measure the relative efficiencies among different private universities in Iran. The proposed study of this paper uses data envelopment analysis along with Malmquist productivity index to measure the relative efficiencies of these units over the period 2004-2007. The method uses three inputs including number of students, number of university professors and the number of employees. The model also includes the number of educated people as well as research outputs for outputs of the DEA model. The results indicate that there are some big gaps among various units in terms of the number of research products and the number of graduated students.