Investigating the Efficiency of University Students: The Case of an Economics Programme in Greece

Abstract

Numerous studies in the field of educational economics regress performance measures on various variables such as age, gender, prior achievement etc. These variables are supposed to be the inputs in the production function of the students. This procedure implicitly assumes that each student uses her resources (inputs) fully efficiently. The purpose of our paper is to assess whether student inefficiency exists. Using Data Envelopement Analysis we estimate the efficiency scores of students studying for an economics degree at University of Patras. We find that both pure technical inefficiency and scale inefficiency exists. We therefore suggest that regressing performance on input variables without controlling for possible inefficiency might lead to inaccurate estimators.

JEL Classification: J29, D29