A Composite Indicator for University Quality Assesment: The Case of Spanish Higher Education System

This study presents a synthetic indicator for quality assessment in the Spanish public university system. The indicator is based on a series of components and simple indicators that were obtained from the public universities’ financial planning estimates. The paper takes a quantitative, wide-ranging approach to analyse the quality of university institutions and is intended to be complimentary to other qualitative approaches. Data Envelopment Analysis was used in order to facilitate the aggregation and weighting of the data used to construct the synthetic indicator. This technique allows the analyst to endogenously determine the weighting of the partial indicators while respecting the peculiarities intrinsic to each university. The results reveal that there are significant differences among Spanish public universities. In addition to how relatively well each of the institutions performs, other factors would seem to be influencing the results; essentially these are related to socio-economic factors and to the application of university policy in Spain over recent decades.