Institutional Missions, Performance, and External Factors. The Case of High- quality Colombian Universities

Abstract

The National Accreditation Council certify universities with high institutional quality developed through their internal improvement processes, determined in a competitive context of decreasing demand. In this regard, it is useful to provide these universities with information about: their performance and their changes over time, reference groups, mechanisms able to achieving better performance, and analysis about possible external factors which could affect the results. This information can represent a basis for sound decision-making about resource management and policy creation that helps the regulators and policy-makers to make appropriate decisions in order to provide high quality education. Thus, we propose a non-parametric approach, based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method, assuming variable return scale, in order to calculate the universities’ performance. Moreover, a productivity index suggested by Malmquist has also been implemented to measure the changes over time of the universities’ performance. We implement different combinations and variables that describe the three key missions of universities and evaluate them from a separate and a global perspective. Finally, in order to check how external factors could affect the universities’ performance, our analysis concludes implementing both non-parametric approach (double-bootstrap-DEA) and parametric approach (Stochastic Frontier Analysis-SFA) that follows a production function specification Cobb-Douglas (CD). In both approaches, we follow a truncated regression. The analysis is performed on a sample of Colombian universities, both public and private. The analysis shows significant improvements, in terms of performance, needed to achieve university missions, in particular for research and knowledge transfer. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the Gini indicator (proxy of the poverty) influences in particular the teaching activities, while the gross domestic product (proxy of the economic development of the territory) and the age of the university (proxy of the reputational status of universities) have a strong impact on research and knowledge transfer activities. These results highlight

not only interesting policy implications policy, but also the need for further research in this area. [edited by Author]