Technical efficiency performance of Malaysian public research universities: Fuzzy data envelopment analysis / Saber Abdelall Mohamed Ahmed

Saber Abdelall, Mohamed Ahmed (2023) Technical efficiency performance of Malaysian public research universities: Fuzzy data envelopment analysis / Saber Abdelall Mohamed Ahmed. PhD thesis, Universiti Malaya.

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Abstract

Of late, university technical efficiency measurement via Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is widely applied when the technique enables universities as the decision-making units (DMUs) to identify the top performers among them being evaluated and discover the alternative ways to spur their operations to become one of the best performers. Despite decreasing trends of government funds to finance universities’ operational and research expenditures, the public research universities in Malaysia (PRUMs) continue to shoulder the responsibility to be a leader in innovation, produce world class research outputs, that includes high impact research publications, and to increase their world ranking and international reputations. Good ranking universities would attract high-quality local students and from abroad. Technical efficiency is an alternative approach to best measure the PRUMs performance at the global level while providing valid data and information for future framework of long-term plans. This is not only crucial for the decision makers of PRUMs but also to National Higher Education. This research employs Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to measure the technical efficiency of five PRUMs for four successive academic years 2018/2019 to 2021/2020. Based on past research supported by scholars in higher education studies, this study three input variables selected are the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) staff, number of full-time-equivalent students and ratio of FTE international students to FTE students. With the growing importance for universities to achieve higher international ranking, that this study proposes the international QS world ranking indicators as the output variables, namely: Teaching Reputation, Research Reputation, and the citations percentage ratio. For the international ranking indicators are beyond the control of research universities, this study aims to measure the technical efficiency of public research universities in Malaysia (PRUMs) by employing the non-parametric Fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis (FDEA) methodology. By utilizing Fuzzy DEA (FDEA) model with algorithm, this study observes the PRUMs efficiency status during the study period and the expected average efficiency for the next 2021/2022 academic year. To further benchmark the efficiency of PRUMs at the international arena, this study assesses PRUMs’ technical efficiency by grouping them together with selected public research universities in Asia (APRU). The contribution of this study is two-fold. First, while many studies on performance measurements of high education institutions (HEI) studies apply DEA methods, this study is among the very few that employ Fuzzy DEA approaches. This study integrates the concept of fuzzy set theory with the traditional DEA by introducing an algorithm to measure the technical efficiency of PRUMs in the form of fuzzy linear programming (FLP) models. Secondly, while DEA model requires precise input and output data of HEIs, this study utilizes the QS World University Ranking research output indicators as the output variables of the Fuzzy DEA model. Clearly the QS metric is beyond the control of any DMUs, thus the application of FDEA suits the criteria to measure the technical efficiency performance of PRUMs at the international level. Findings from this study reveal, while all PRUMs are expected to be fully efficient in the next 2021/2022 academic years, this is not the case when benchmarked against the selected Asian public universities. Areas of improvement can be observed by determining the respective variables that need further analysis to achieve full efficiency.

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