The efficiency and effectiveness of faculties within the University of Malta

Abstract

The University of Malta is an important institution within the context of the educational system in Malta. For such reasons the Government of Malta allocates a large amount of funds - €63.7 million in 2015 - for the university to operate, with the aim of these funds to be used to improve the local workforce. The aim of this dissertation is to study the efficiency and effectiveness of the faculties and institutes within the University of Malta. With the use of a Data Envelopment Analysis, four models are constructed in order to obtain scores of technical efficiency of the faculties and the two institutes included in the sample. The data used to measure the teaching outcomes was based on the academic year 2012/13 while the data used to measure the expenditure of the faculties and institutes was taken as an average of the two years in question. Findings suggest that there are large differences in the efficiency across the faculties. The most efficient faculties were the Faculty Education, the Faculty of Laws and the Institute for European Studied followed by FEMA, the Faculty of Arts and the Institute for Tourism, Travel & Culture. On the other hand, the least efficient faculties were the Faculty of Dental Surgery, the Faculty of Science, the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Science, the Faculty of Information and Communications Technology and the Faculty of Engineering. Results were then augmented by the faculty’s employability index produced by ETC and mapped in quadrants highlighting the cost-efficiency and labour market effectiveness (relevance) of each faculty or institute.