In this study, we have applied a quantitative approach to estimate two types of efficiencies of Australian TAFE institutes, focussing on the transformation of financial and administrative inputs into teaching load outcomes on one hand, and the transformation of institutional resources into employment outcomes on the other.

In Australia, the vocational education and training (VET) sector accounts for approximately A$8 billion of public spending, of which around A$6.6 billion is spent on government providers that include Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutes. The TAFE institutes in Australia are large, public VET providers, generally funded and managed by state government. Measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of TAFE institutes is of great interest to policy makers, regulators, consumers and to the institutions themselves. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

We used data relating to student cohort demographics, institutional characteristics and educational outcome data and quantitative models to develop the two measures of efficiency.

We found significant inefficiencies in the Australian TAFE system. These inefficiencies were mainly related to the degree of remoteness and student characteristics, both of which could be seen as exogenous to the TAFEs themselves.  As TAFE institutes serve a student constituency that is generally of lower socioeconomic status, an acknowledgement of the higher costs and lower efficiencies inherent in providing educational activities to TAFE’s traditional student body is an important finding.  We showed in this paper that different types of efficiencies of the same institutes are not necessarily linearly related. For policy makers it is therefore necessary to take a multi-dimensional approach that takes into account the various aspects of different approaches to the concept of efficiency when making policy decisions.

Peter Fieger, Renato Andrin Villano, John Rice, Ray Cooksey , (2017),” Two dimensional efficiency measurements in vocational education Evidence from Australia“, International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 66 Iss 2 pp. 196 – 215