The Study On Scale Efficiency Of China’s University Considering Environmental Influences

Efficient operation is often regarded as one objective of organization administration, which implies that one organization gains a good deal of outputs by consuming low levels of inputs. Education efficiency, whose concept originated in economics, means the utilization efficiency of education resource. When education is regarded as an operation activity, its efficiency should be taken into consideration and then came the concept of education efficiency.Through the research on education efficiency of the universities, we find an interesting phenomenon that some efficient organizations behave very different, and one of the differences is the various scale levels. For example, some excellent universities have a very large scale of students, while others recruit fewer students. In many well-known universities in the United States, the scale of students’number has a lot difference. California Institute of Technology had only less than one thousand undergraduates, while the number of undergraduates of Berkeley was larger than 20000. This explains that the environmental factors of the universities affect the best size. How to evaluate the scale efficiency of universities by considering the environmental influences, and further enhance the overall level of resources utilization, has become one of the important topics of education economic research.This paper proposes a new model based on the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method to evaluate the scale efficiency with considering the environmental influences. This model consists of five stages, as a result, the model can also be referred to as the five-stage DEA model. Using this method, we can get the pure scale efficiency which has eliminated the environmental factors and random errors that might influence the production process.Afterwards, in order to measure the scale efficiency of China’s universities with more accuracy, this paper gives an empirical study on the scale efficiency of the universities in China by applying the five-stage DEA model. The results show that the efficiency levels of many universities are indeed affected by external environmental variables and random factors. According to the levels of pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency, we divide China’s universities into four types, and we also propose some suggestions for the inefficient universities to improve their scale efficiency.The contribution of this paper lies in:this paper proposes a new technique to evaluate the scale efficiency with considering the environmental influences, and gives an empirical study on the scale efficiency of the universities in China by applying the five-stage DEA model; this paper helps us to understand China’s universities’ overall level of resource utilization, in addition, the current study also provides some suggestions for universities to improve their teaching efficiency.