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Evaluating the Efficiency of Top Liberal Arts Colleges

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Abstract

This study applies a data envelopment analysis model developed for national universities to 93 national liberal arts colleges. Such models can be used by individual institutions for benchmarking purposes or by researchers seeking to compare the practices of highly efficient liberal arts colleges with the practices of relatively inefficient colleges. Six-year graduation rate is used as the output variable. Particular attention is paid to the construction of cost per undergraduate as an input variable. In addition to a ranking of the institutions according to their efficiency, between one and five of the 18 technically efficient peer institutions were identified as peers for each of the remaining 75 technically inefficient institutions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information Services Division, Rhodes College, 2000 North Parkway, Memphis, TN, 38112, USA

    James E. Eckles

  2. Department of Leadership, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA

    James E. Eckles

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  1. James E. Eckles
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Correspondence to James E. Eckles.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 4 and 5.

Table 4 Technical efficiency scores and peer sets, ordered alphabetically by institution name
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Table 5 Outputs, inputs, and input slacks
Full size table

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Eckles, J.E. Evaluating the Efficiency of Top Liberal Arts Colleges. Res High Educ 51, 266–293 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-009-9157-4

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