The paper contributes to the growing and often controversial study of higher education productivity measurement. The paper clarifies core productivity ideas, and considers alternative models for productivity assessment. Results from these models are explored using data from Australian higher education. Findings reveal implications for the…

Significant variations in educational outcomes across both the spatial and socioeconomic spectra in Australia have been widely debated by policymakers in recent years. This paper examines these variations and decomposes educational outcomes into 3 major input factors: availability of school resources, socioeconomic background, and a latent factor…

Budgetary constraints on the public purse have led Australian Federal and State governments to focus increasingly on the efficiency of public institutions, including Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutes. In this study, we define efficiency as the relationship between financial and administrative inputs and educational outputs. We…

Uses nonparametric statistical techniques to estimate technical and scale efficiency on individual Australian universities using various measures of outputs and inputs. Finds that regardless of the output mix, Australian universities as a whole record high levels of efficiency relative to each other. (Contains 34 references.) (Author/PKP)

The first part of this paper discusses two principal forms elaborated upon in previous literature for describing the relation between per pupil operating costs and school enrollment size. The first of these forms indicates that average per pupil costs decline up to a point as enrollment increases, reach a minimum, and then rise with further school…