Journal on Efficiency and Responsibility in Education and Science

262-274

Authors: Veronika Blašková, Michaela Staňková

In the 21st century there is a lot of attention on sustainability (whether social or environmental). However, unfortunately, the economic perspective has been largely neglected in the field of education. This article deals with a quantitative assessment of the efficiency of tertiary education in individual EU countries, which allows to include the economic aspect of the evaluation. Furthermore, we are expanding the commonly established evaluation system based on the number of graduates to include another area, namely the graduate's employability on the labor market. We believe that for a correct evaluation of individual education systems it is necessary to include the relevance and quality of acquired knowledge and skills. Although the efficiency assessment is carried out for the whole EU, the results are presented according to identified groups of countries that have similar education systems. Countries such as Ireland and France emerge as top performers because of their ability to produce large numbers of graduates given their resources. Malta and Luxembourg have also performed very well in the efficiency assessment, although they produce far fewer graduates in terms of resources, but thanks to the system set up, graduates in these countries are highly employable in the labor market.

287-298

Authors: Markéta Matulová

The paper introduces a novel approach to university rankings that considers a university's contribution to sustainable development. It addresses the usual controversies surrounding the construction of rankings using composite indicators. The conventional approach typically involves normalizing sub-indicators and applying subjective weights for aggregation, which raises concerns about the reliability of the rankings. In response to this issue, we propose an alternative method based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) that utilizes flexible weights. Our approach is applied to the data from the UI-GreenMetric World University Ranking. We initially employ a general Benefit of the Doubt DEA model and subsequently enhance its discrimination power by computing super-efficiency. In the third model, we impose weight restrictions on sub-indicators. The results of our analysis offer valuable insights for all stakeholders, as illustrated by the implications derived for Czech universities included in the sample. Furthermore, we compare the results of universities in various European countries, establishing a connection between rankings and the fulfillment of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) within individual countries. This research contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between university performance, sustainability, and the associated implications for policy and benchmarking.

313-328

Authors: Jana Hančlová, Lucie Chytilová

The priority goals of the development of Czech higher education include ensuring the quality of its activities, improving the availability and relevance of flexible forms of education, and increasing efficiency in teaching and research. Several professional articles evaluated educational efficiency, but the proposed models did not include unemployed graduate students. The paper assesses education efficiency at public universities in the Czech Republic in 2020-2021 using an extended Data envelopment model with undesirable outputs, non-proportional and non-radial measures of distance from the efficient frontier. The influence of selected economic, social, regional and institutional factors on education efficiency is estimated by a panel regression model using the Feasible generalized least squares method. The results document the level and development of education efficiency and find insufficient reduction of unemployed graduates as a critical problem of inefficiency. More prominent universities achieve higher education efficiency. The main statistically significant factors influencing changes in education efficiency are population density, the unemployment rate, the location of the university in larger urban centres and the number of students per university employee.