Assessment of quality and efficiency in higher education system. Empirical study for the EU countries

High quality and efficient education are fundamental to a country's development. As a result, the continuous assessment of the quality and efficiency of education remains a subject of constant debate. This has led to an increased interest in developing evaluation methods that are as reliable as possible. In this paper, we assess the quality and efficiency of higher education by constructing composite quality and efficiency indices, using various statistical methods for European Union's countries for the year 2022. For the construction of the composite quality index, we considered nine variables, then we used principal component analysis (PCA) to determine the importance of each variable, whereas the weighting method was applied in order to extract the factor loading coefficients of the score matrix. To construct the composite efficiency index, eight variables were analysed and we applied stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), which estimated a production frontier and measured the random inefficiency of production units. Inefficiency scores were obtained for each country and were combined with the outputs considered in the analysis to provide an overview of the efficiency of decision-making units (DMUs). These results were then correlated with the number of universities included in the international top rankings using the Spearman coefficient. Our findings reveal a positive correlation between the two composite indices and the number of universities featured in these rankings for each country analysed. This confirms that the analysed variables provide insight into the quality and efficiency of higher education system in these countries, which could increase the number of universities included in the international rankings.