The Performance Evaluation of Turkey’ State Universities Founded in 1992 By Using Data Envelopment Analysis: Application of Regional Geography

State universities are independent institutions which are organized and established by laws as having a public entity, and according to the internal structure, they are specified as communities of goods for a particular social purpose. Despite the fact that they are independent and therefore unrelated, they obtain similar outputs by using similar inputs. To make productivity comparisons relative to each other is becoming almost impossible due to the fact that they are unrelated to each other. Because; there are very different from each other in factors such as the number of academic staff, number of administrative staff, number of students, graduate student number, the number of academic units, the annual budget the amount of annual expenditure amount, scientific activities of academic staff, the number of projects carried out, the number of patents, socio-demographic factors due to their geographical locations. Because they are independent of each other while obtaining similar outcomes by using similar inputs; in this study, to evaluate their processes and in order to make comparison relative to each other possible, a non-parametric technique -data enveloping analysis- is used which is aiming to make relative efficiency comparison, utilizes linear programming concepts and can provide internal insights to managerial mechanisms. In the study, 7 universities which are founded in 1992, were selected as state universities representing seven geographical regions and data was used which is based on official information the annual report 2014, they announced to the public in 2015. The purpose of the study is to assess how effective they are, relative to each other on the outputs of selected higher education institutions by using data inputs. Limitation of the study is constructed by the fact that universities are not preparing their official annual reports, they submit to public access, providing data unity in the content. Therefore, the selected input and output values are preferred as general data rather than specific data as much as possible. Seven state universities have been analyzed on their relative activities of 2014 and which universities are whether non-effective in terms of input and output values so that the evaluations were made on ways that they must follow to be able to become effective.