Modeling the Education Supply Chain with Network DEA Model: The Case of Tunisia

Little has been done on network DEA in education, and nobody has attempted to model the whole education supply chain using network DEA. As such the contribution of the present paper is to evaluate the efficiency of Tunisian education supply chain with a network DEA developed by Kao and Hwang (Eur J Oper Res 185:418–429, 2008). The idea consists on subdividing the education system into three sub-processes, where, primary, secondary and tertiary education are linked by intermediate variables. Input variables of the whole education system are “the number of schools” and “the number of students enrolled in the first year of basic education”. Output generated from basic education “Promoted pupils from basic education” is the only input used by secondary education. The output variable “Graduates from secondary education” is then used by tertiary education to produce the output of the whole education system which is “Graduates from tertiary education”. The results of assessment show that most governorates have a lower efficiency scores in tertiary education compared to efficiency in basic and secondary education. The results of the efficiency scores ranking demonstrate an important similarity between the ranks of the whole education system efficiency and the tertiary education efficiency. This result confirms that the inefficiency of education in Tunisia is mainly due to the inefficiency of tertiary education.