IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/edfpol/v7y2012i3p331-359.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Efficiency-Based Funding for Public Four-Year Colleges and Universities

Author

Listed:
  • Thomas R. Sexton

    (State University of New York-Stony Brook)

  • Christie L. Comunale

    (Long Island University)

  • Stephen C. Gara

    (Drake University)

Abstract

We propose an efficiency-based mechanism for state funding of public colleges and universities using data envelopment analysis. We describe the philosophy and the mathematics that underlie the approach and apply\break the proposed model to data from 362 U.S. public four-year colleges and universities. The model provides incentives to institution administrators to eliminate wasteful spending and increase positive outcomes while maintaining educational quality and research productivity. The institutions in our study spent $96.74 billion, and states would reimburse $88.02 billion. Thus efficiency-based funding would reduce state government expenditures on these institutions by $8.72 billion, or approximately 9.0 percent. Efficiency-based funding is politically viable, as demonstrated by North Carolina’s successful use of this approach in pupil transportation operations since 1994. The model will be of interest to state legislators, state education officials, and others who are concerned with funding formulas for institutions of higher education. © 2012 Association for Education Finance and Policy

Suggested Citation

  • Thomas R. Sexton & Christie L. Comunale & Stephen C. Gara, 2012. "Efficiency-Based Funding for Public Four-Year Colleges and Universities," Education Finance and Policy, MIT Press, vol. 7(3), pages 331-359, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:tpr:edfpol:v:7:y:2012:i:3:p:331-359
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/EDFP_a_00070
    Download Restriction: Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Alexander Arévalo S & Víctor Giménez G & Diego Prior J, 2022. "Análisis de eficiencia en educación: una aplicación del método StoNED," Revista Desarrollo y Sociedad, Universidad de los Andes,Facultad de Economía, CEDE, vol. 92(2), pages 45-91, October.
    2. Kristof De Witte & Laura López-Torres, 2017. "Efficiency in education: a review of literature and a way forward," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 68(4), pages 339-363, April.
    3. Kunsch, Pierre L. & Ishizaka, Alessio, 2018. "Multiple-criteria performance ranking based on profile distributions: An application to university research evaluations," Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (MATCOM), Elsevier, vol. 154(C), pages 48-64.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    higher education; college; universities; state funding;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I23 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Higher Education; Research Institutions

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tpr:edfpol:v:7:y:2012:i:3:p:331-359. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kelly McDougall (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://direct.mit.edu/journals .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.