Higher education expansion policy in Türkiye: Institutional efficiency, structural determinants, and national-level implications for public universities

Date

2026-6-12

Author

Kulakoğlu, Büşra

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This thesis examines the expansion of Turkish higher education, particularly since 1990s with attention to the “a university for each province” policy by (1) assessing whether this policy intervention has resulted in a HE expansion that meets acceptable levels of institutional efficiency across Türkiye's public universities, (2) identifying economic, social, and technological regional drivers associated with variations in university efficiency, and (3) evaluating how public universities cluster based on teaching, research, and third-mission performance, and whether these empirical groupings align with the institutional classifications introduced by the Council of Higher Education. The study proceeds in three analytical phases. First, stochastic frontier analyses are applied to multiple and combined outputs to estimate the efficiency of public universities established up to 2018 using a nine-year panel covering 2014-2022. Second, beta regression models are employed on a 2018-2021 panel to identify time-specific, contextual predictors of university efficiency. Third, cluster analysis is conducted on 2022 efficiency scores to examine similarities and divergences between Council of Higher Education classifications and empirically derived groupings. The findings suggest that the “a university for each province” policy has produced heterogeneities disguised as homogeneity. That is, converging under a uniform policy framework, Turkish higher education exhibits systemic variation at the institutional level through mission-specific frontier gaps, at the structural level through selective contextual constraints, and at the system level through performance configurations that do not fully match formal categories. These findings suggest the need for differentiated, capacity-oriented policies that support performance improvement without reinforcing one-size-fits-all models of institutional development.

Subject Keywords

Higher education expansion, Institutional efficiency, Cluster analysis, Beta regression, Higher education policy

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/119450

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis