Quality of higher education in EU countries assessed by constructing a composite quality index

Improving the quality of higher education is an increasingly important objective of any country's economic policy. Therefore, the evaluation of quality in higher education became important for the policy-decision makers and has led to the development of various methodologies by researchers over the years. In our paper we assessed the quality of higher education by constructing a composite index for a 3-year period, 2020-2022, considering ten variables reflected in four dimensions for the EU countries: teaching, research, institutional and economic dimensions. In order to construct the quality indices, the principal component analysis (PCA) was applied to determine the importance of each variable; the weighting method was used to extract the factor coefficient score matrix loadings. This type of evaluation carried out regularly and objectively could represent an important support for the authorities and the higher education board members to improve the quality of their institution. By applying a panel data analysis, we measured the influence of some economic indicators on these quality indices. Through this study we observed the differences between EU countries in terms of higher education and the importance of each measurement dimension used. These findings can be used to compare the dynamics of higher education quality in each country.