In an ominously steady progression over the past decades, education in general, higher education in particular, and even honors education have increasingly been contextualized in the realm of the marketplace. Cost/benefit analyses of colleges and universities are examined; institutions in terms of their price to consumers (students and their…

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…

In the literature of higher education cost function study, enough knowledge is created in the area of economy scale in the context of developed countries but the knowledge of input demand is lacking. On the other hand, empirical knowledge in the context of developing countries is very meagre. The paper fills up the knowledge gap, estimating a…

One of the standard labor practices of research universities is to hire, pay, and promote faculty members on the basis of the research they produce. In the humanities, professors write books and articles and universities reward them accordingly. The system amounts to a considerable expenditure for the institution and a significant portion of…

This report is the culmination of a yearlong effort to study the efficiency of the nation's public education system and includes the first-ever attempt to evaluate the productivity of almost every major school district in the country. In the business world, the notion of productivity describes the benefit received in exchange for effort or money…

This article presents a model for the analysis of cost efficiency within the framework of data envelopment analysis models. It calculates the cost excess, separating a unit of production from its optimal or frontier levels, and, at the same time, breaks these excesses down into three explanatory factors: (a) technical inefficiency, which depends…

Those with the burden of financing public education are looking toward product measurement for guidance in planning and modifying programs and in justifying expenditures to taxpayers. "Outcomes orientation" is rooted in program budgeting theory with emphasis on cost-benefit analysis and input-output relationships that can be demonstrated and…

This paper provides a conceptual framework for addressing the issue of effectiveness and efficiency in education. It considers alternative criteria for identifying efficiency and discusses constraints on improving efficiency. The first section distinguishes efficiency from effectiveness, and also distinguishes "internal" from "external" efficiency…

This publication is a discussion of the concept of an educational production function, a mathematical formulation of the relationship between inputs and outputs in education. A description of how a production function can direct decision making toward economic efficiency precedes a theoretical discussion of the nature of actual estimation. Several…

Expands on an earlier article which states that economies of scale cannot exist unless the production function exhibits increasing returns to scale. Argues that this is correct only to the extent that the firm faces constant input prices as output expands. Concludes that the assumption that product and input markets are competitive may be…

The operations of an institution can be viewed from three perspectives: (1) the "actual operating measurement" such as income and expenditures of a cost center at a point in time; (2) the "criterion" which reflects the established policy for a time period; and (3) the "efficiency level" wherein a balance between input and output is defined.…

In the last decade, a modeling technique has been developed to handle complex input/output analyses where outputs involve joint products and there are no known mathematical relationships linking the outputs or inputs. The technique uses the geometrical concept of a six-dimensional shape called a polytope to analyze the efficiency of each…

The interests of economists in educational systems have taken two directions: (1) Concern for the interchange of resources between educational systems and the national economy, and (2) an interest in the production of education. In expressing the resource interchange, economists rely on the language of productivity. Of concern is the global…

Analyzes resource allocations in institutions of higher education to undergraduate costs, graduate costs, and faculty research and teaching time in order to determine educational "productivity." Although real undergraduate costs were found to be much lower than previously assumed, cost-based subsidies and the redistributive effects of higher…