Efficiency evaluation of higher education systems in China: A double frontier parallel DEA model.

Higher education plays a crucial role in socioeconomic development. This paper proposes a double frontier parallel data envelopment analysis model to evaluate the performance of Chinese higher education systems. Such a system can be divided into a higher ordinary education subsystem and a higher vocational education subsystem. The presented approach comprehensively measures higher education system performance in terms of optimistic and pessimistic aspects. Using the presented approach, we estimate the overall and subsystem efficiencies simultaneously. We use this new technique to study the efficiencies of 30 provincial higher education systems in China during 2015-2017. Our crucial findings are as follows. (1) The presented model has more ranking discrimination power than the traditional optimistic and pessimistic models. (2) Jiangsu, Shaanxi, and Shandong obtain high average system efficiencies. (3) The inefficiency of higher education systems stem from both the higher ordinary education subsystem and higher vocational education subsystem. (4) The western area of China has the lowest average system efficiency and average subsystem efficiencies.