2014 Reports

Efficiency in the Community College Sector: Stochastic Frontier Analysis

Agasisti, Tommaso; Belfield, Clive

This paper estimates technical efficiency scores across the community college sector. Using stochastic frontier analysis and data from IPEDS for 2003–2010, we estimate efficiency scores for 950 community colleges and perform a series of sensitivity tests to check for robustness. We find that community colleges have become more efficient over time but find no evidence of economies of scale. We also find significant variation in efficiency across colleges, with only part of this variation explained by exogenous differences by state and across student characteristics.