Teaching Information And Communication Technology In European Universities: A Non-Parametric Efficiency Perspective

Education in Information Technology is becoming more important than ever to the contemporary digital society. It is one of the fields with the fastest growing career paths globally. In Europe alone, year 2016 marked a rapid growth in the number of employed persons with an education in Information and Communication Technologies and the growth persists ever since. This paper aims to examine the efficiency of teaching undergraduates in ICT programmes in European Universities. The analysis employs the non-parametric framework of VRS-DEA estimator on an empirical dataset of 96 universities, extracted from The European Tertiary Education Register, taking into the account only the human resources involved in the teaching activities: personnel, enrolled students and graduates, with a distinction between undergraduate and doctoral, given the ISCED level. After a thorough preprocessing phase that included two different clustering algorithms to identify similar and comparable institutions in terms of the ICT specialisations offered, a set of statistical tests were applied in order to identify empirically the hypotheses of the production set, that allow for choosing the appropriate efficiency estimator, which was further employed. Results draw attention towards a potential pattern for the better performing universities with ICT programs to exhibit economies to scale, while at the same time loading the teaching staff slightly more than the low performing institutions.