| Summary: | 博士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 農業經濟學研究所 === 93 === The higher education institutions in Taiwan are de factor administrated at the discretion of the Ministry of Education for the past several decades. Issues on cost structure and efficiency of the higher education institutions have been highly debated in recent years. Most empirical studies use enrollments and research publications as educational outputs and in some instances differentiate the cost and efficiency by curriculum and programs in graduate and undergraduate instructions. They have mostly ignored the effects of quality differential on cost structure and efficiency measurement.
The objective of this research is to develop an empirical model that explicitly accounts for the output quality and the institutional characteristics in evaluating cost structure and efficiencies to the polytechnic higher education institutions in Taiwan. Since output quality varies significantly among the polytechnic schools, ignoring such quality variation may result in bias estimation of the cost structure and efficiency. One hundred ninety four polytechnic higher education institutions are evaluated. These polytechnic higher education institutions include the universities of science and technology, the colleges of technology, and the vocational junior colleges.
The output variables used are the number of full-time student enrollment, number of professional certificates obtained by students, faculty’s research publications, and the extension services. Six output quality variables are used to adjust the quality difference in teaching, research and extension services. The input variables are model specific. The institutional characteristics include the organizational factors such as school ownership, school type, and field specialization.
A translog stochastic frontier cost function is estimated to compute the university’s economies of scale and economies of scope. The empirical results show that the sample average economies of scale is at 1.1239, and the economies of scope is at 0.7873. It implies the existence of both scale and scope economies at the polytechnic higher education institutions in Taiwan.
When the quality of output is accounted for, the estimated efficiency index shows that the public college and university are more efficient in cost minimization. Furthermore, the proposed quality-adjusted stochastic frontier model has higher cost efficiency scores than the cost efficiency score estimated by the quality-unadjusted model. The quality of outputs places a significant role in assessing the cost structure and efficiency of a university. Empirical results show that the universities of science and technology have the highest efficiency scores, followed by the colleges of technology and the vocational junior colleges.
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