| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 國際經濟所 === 94 === Academic performance of universities has long been a great concern among education practitioners and economists. This study intends to scrutinize the significance of external factors that affect the academic achievements of worldwide top research universities. Seventy-eight outstanding universities from the ranking list of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University are taken as a sample. Research activities undertaken in universities are considered to be a production process. Ranking scores -- mainly the academic publications and citations -- are treated as outputs, while the number of researchers and research funds are as inputs.
Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method is first applied to evaluate the technical efficiency of utilizing academic resources of the universities under study. The degree of inefficiency and input slacks are thus derived. The truncated Tobit model is then used to regress the degree of inefficiency and slacks on external environmental variables, such as GDP per capita of the country/state where the university locates in, the history and the scale of the university, the population size of the location of the institute, and the number of research fields in the institute, etc.
Empirical results show that the GDP per capita and the length of history are significant in explaining the degree of inefficiency. The scale of the university shows a quadratic relation with academic efficiency. The demographic character of the site and the scope of academic fields in the institute show a trivial effect on academic achievement. Policy implications on Taiwan’s academic practices are discussed at the end of the study.
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