Productivity indicators in higher education

Productivity in service production in general and especially in university teaching and research is an interesting research question with specific difficulties. In Germany since 2006 the new `Excellence Initiative Programme´ for universities has inhibited further discussions in the context of university management and the productivity of higher education (HE) institutions as well as for the task of evaluating university performance. Therefore an in depth analysis of productivity in universities is of interest for HE managers as well as for HE politicians deciding about public university budgets. Additionally the methods and lessons learned from this specific discussion about higher education as `service industry´ could well be transferred to other service companies and service production contexts. This article describes two different ways to measure university productivity (input-output analysis and data envelopment analysis). Altogether the research results point to the fact that there are in general two ways towards university productivity: (a) Extending budgets (`clustering/scaling´, which is limited) and (b) excellence in research/university management (`steering/integration´). Therefore it can be assumed that economies of scale exist in universities but are limited to restricted ranges of institutional size. For other service companies the question of output measurement in KPIs couls be tackled also with indicators offering a huge field of practical applications from top management remuneration to corporate steering and benchmarking.