A DEA application for analyzing investment activities in higher educational organizations

Private schools play important role on developing economy especially in rural areas of Iran and when they operate efficiently it can also be considered as a rich source of income. During the past three decades, data envelopment analysis (DEA) has become a popular technique for measuring the relative performance of non-financial units. In this paper, we present an empirical study to measure the relative efficiency of 11 private universities located in region ten of Islamic Azad university. The proposed study of this paper assigns some points for human resources including university professor and regular employees and considers it along with assets as inputs of DEA model. We also consider the number of graduated students and operating profit as output of our proposed DEA model. The implementation of standard BCC method yields 6 efficient units and to have better results we use another DEA technique. The results of this study present some investment opportunities for management of this private university.