A Discipline-Specific Academic Performance Appraisal of Higher Education Institutions in India

Abstract

In the modern world, nations are working hard to create a knowledge-based economy in which the most valuable resources are knowledge, skills, technology, and education, all of which are crucial for improving the quality of human capital formation. Higher education institutions are in a hurry to establish their credentials in numerical games. Numerous rating and accreditation authorities, both domestically and internationally, are in place to evaluate their academic performance. Nevertheless, there are a number of problems and objections to the methodological frameworks that rank institutions which motivate to examine the performance of higher education institutions by using an alternative methodology. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the efficiency scores of top-rated higher education institutions in India that specialize in the engineering discipline and also tries to find out the key determinants that affect the performance level of select educational institutions. For analyzing the efficiency scores, the Data Envelopment Analysis Method has been used, and to find out the impact of the determinants on the performance level, the Tobit regression model has been taken into consideration. The findings indicate that, out of the chosen institutions, IIT Bombay and VIT perform the best, while IIT Hyderabad has to improve. However, it has also been found that educational institutions need to focus more on their number of foreign students and to gain experiences to perform better.