Assessing the performance of UK universities in the field of chemical engineering using data envelopment analysis

Publication date: Available online 5 July 2019Source: Education for Chemical EngineersAuthor(s): Andrés González-Garay, Carlos Pozo, Ángel Galán-Martín, Clemens Brechtelsbauer, Benoît Chachuat, Deesha Chadha, Colin Hale, Klaus Hellgardt, Andreas Kogelbauer, Omar K. Matar, Niall McDowell, Nilay Shah, Gonzalo Guillén-GosálbezAbstractUniversity rankings have become an important tool to compare academic institutions within and across countries. Yet, they rely on aggregated scores based on subjective weights which render them sensitive to experts’ preferences and not fully transparent to final users. To overcome this limitation, we apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to evaluate UK universities in the field of chemical engineering as a case study, using data retrieved from The Guardian University Guide 2018. DEA is a non-parametric approach developed for the multi-criteria assessment of entities that avoids the use of subjective weightings and aggregated scores; this is accomplished by calculating an efficiency index, on the basis of which universities can be classified as either ‘efficient’ or ‘inefficient’. Our analysis shows that the Higher Education Institutions (HEI) occupying the highest positions in the chemical engineering rankings might not be the most efficient ones, and vice versa, which highlights the need to complement the use of rankings with other analytical tools. Overall, DEA provides further insight into the assessment of HEIs, allowing instit...
Source: Education for Chemical Engineers - Category: Chemistry Source Type: research