้ABSTRACT In this paper, we examine the comparative efficiency of higher education
institutions in the UK. The governmental initiatives of the last decade within this sector
have given emphasis to issues of accountability, value for money and cost control. The
reporting of various statistics regarding the universities' activities only fully achieves its
potential value if it is used to define comprehensive concepts of performance and goal
achievements informed by the institutions' missions. In that spirit, we propose concepts of
cost and outcome efficiency in order to gain further insights into the universities' operations.
Data envelopment analysis and its recent advances were used to assess the two types of
eficiency. The application of the methodology to 45 universities in the UK revealed a subset
of six institutions that showed satisfactory performance across alternative efficiency tests.