Evaluation of the efficiency of agrarian institutions of higher education of Ukraine using the DEA method

The relevance of the study is determined by the need to perfect the evaluation of the efficiency of scientific and educational activities of the country’s higher education institutions and determine the causes of inefficiency. The purpose of this study was to improve the evaluation of the efficiency of scientific publication activities of agrarian higher education institutions of Ukraine using the Data Envelopment Analysis method. The study was conducted according to the general heuristic method, the authors also employed mathematical and statistical methods of processing and analysis of input and output data, computer methods for the implementation of research tasks and abstract-logical methods for determining the degree of relevance, formulation of conclusions. The study substantiated the feasibility of using the non-parametric method of Data Envelopment Analysis to evaluate the efficiency of the scientific and educational activities of higher education institutions, as well as the feasibility of using Voluntary Retirement Services and Compulsory Retirement Service models, which are input-oriented, to evaluate the technical, purely technical, large-scale efficiency of scientific publication activity. Based on statistical information for 2020-2021, the technical, purely technical, large-scale efficiency of the scientific publication activity of 38 agricultural institutions of higher education of Ukraine were evaluated using the Data Envelopment Analysis method. According to the results of calculations, 18% of the educational institutions under study have the maximum value of technical and large-scale efficiency. The average technical efficiency is 0.6, the average pure technical efficiency – 0.7, and the average scale efficiency – 0.85. The analysis of the estimated values of relative efficiency allowed identifying the reasons for the inefficiency of each higher education institution under study, including suboptimal use of educational resources and an unbalanced scale of activity. Based on the study results, a rating of agrarian institutions of higher education in Ukraine in terms of the efficiency of scientific publication activities was compiled, which can be used as an addition to conventional ratings for analysing scientific and educational activities. The results of this study can be used to rank higher educational institutions by efficiency, to find the reasons for their ineffective activities