Evaluation of efficiency of education: overview of international experience

This article provides an overview of foreign literature sources related to the topics of efficiency of education. The goal of the present research is to reveal and highlight key approaches to the definition of the term «efficiency» and the ways of its evaluation if the field of education. The conducted analysis covers sources from major scientific journals from «Science Direct» and «Springer link» bases, where the foreign researches highlight the duality of the concept: as a term of engineering efficiency from one side, and the complete fulfillment of goals, i. e. effectiveness, from the other. According to the studied literature, the research has usually been driven by the demand of the reforms of the educational system to increase its production efficiency, which relates the initial parameters (like time and resources) with the educational process to achieve the desired result. Such an approach has become the leading one, which has been proved by multiple sources in this field. In the majority of cases the influence of a certain specific parameter to the expenses of the system has been considered, or the efficiency has been compared with an ideal case of the institution, which has been supposed to possess the highest possible efficiency based on some assumptions or chosen criteria. Such comparison with the best practice can be represented as a simple mathematical difference of the two efficiency numbers or, in further cases, more complicated mathematical approaches like data envelopment analysis can be implemented. Some researchers conclude that most of the known methodologies to evaluate efficiency may not be used in real life cases to develop management models, which poses the question of the overall implementation of the reforms of the educational system and their results. In a very few cases the authors consider this problem from the point of efficiency of the overall educational or research process. The conducted research has shown that the approaches proposed in foreign scientific sources do not allow to choose the proper approach to the evaluation of efficiency of education that may be applied in practice of management in the Russian educational system, including the design of its development programs.