Technical Efficiency of Business Administration courses – a simultaneous analysis using DEA and SFA

Abstract

Technical efficiency of higher education has been mostly studied by the methods Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier Analysis. However, usually papers either compare the efficiency between public institutions or between departments and in both cases, using variables that reflect the teaching and the research with the same importance. In this paper the two methodologies are applied to measure the efficiency of the Business Administration courses in private for-profit institutions, focused just on education and located in the same geographical region. Variables were selected to cover the specific aspects of these courses and the results showed the complementarities of these two approaches.