An alternative assessment approach to national higher education system evaluation

While the assessment of higher education systems is informative to both policy makers and individuals, it is subjective and performed according to experts' judgment. The present study proposes a relatively objective approach, hierarchical data envelopment analysis (H-DEA), to rank higher education systems. Unlike the subjective approach, H-DEA utilizes endogenous weight determination, allowing assessors to identify the relative importance of each attribute and subattribute. Utilizing the U21 Ranking of National Higher Education System 2020 data, our analysis indicates that the output attribute is a crucial factor influencing the overall performance of higher education systems, even considering countries' stage of development and culture. The computed weights of the H-DEA framework show various attributes' different contributions by group. Resources allocated to the higher education system are important for developing countries, while a high degree of internationalization and a strong link between academia and industry matter for advanced countries. Surprisingly, Asian and Western cultures experience similar performance in their higher education systems, reflecting the Asian higher education system's development toward the Western style. The performance of countries with non-Asian-non-Western cultures, as expected, lags behind, and putting more resources into these countries' higher education system is a way to enhance the overall performance.