Performance Evaluation for Higher Educational Institutions within Data Envelopment Analysis

Nowadays, governments are increasingly investing more money in universities and especially in the higher education in order to improve their quality. At the same time universities are facing a dramatic growth on the number of students especially the graduate students. Hence, measuring the performance of such universities in order to evaluate how they react with such number increase is vital. Hence, this paper will evaluate the performance of Jordanian higher educational institutions and then highlights weakness points in reasons that caused inefficient universities (if found). In order to achieve this, the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is used to measure the performance of the institutions so that inefficient ones (if found) are labeled. Recommendations will then be drawn to guide the inefficient institutions to improve their performance. In this paper, we will measure the performance of Jordanian universities as a special case.