Exploring the Heterogeneity among Higher Education Institutions in Europe

Measuring the performance of tertiary educational systems begins with the appropriate selection of inputs and outputs illustrating the most important educational processes achieved in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). European HEIs use a multiple input-output production framework. It is widely known that HEIs use distinct human, financial and physical resources to offer educational services, quantified by qualitative and quantitative outcomes. Assessing the efficiency of teaching and research activities performed by HEIs is widely investigated nowadays. This study explores the heterogeneity of 363 European HEIs in their teaching and research processes. Firstly, the reduction dimension technique proposed by Mouchart and Simar is used to construct aggregated input and output. Secondly, the cluster analysis is performed on the aggregated indicators to identify different associations of universities based on their similarities. The Mahalanobis distance is applied as reduced indicators are moderately correlated between them. The 363 public and private European HEIs are grouped into six distinct categories, with the second cluster incorporating 68% of the investigated universities. The classification of private and public European HEIs shows the heterogeneity of tertiary educational systems. Some of the higher educational systems are homogenous as all the HEIs are grouped into one cluster, while the German, Spanish and Italian systems are not so homogenous, the HEIs are distributed in separate clusters.