Do Financial Investment, Disciplinary Differences, and Level of Development Impact on the Efficiency of Resource Allocation in Higher Education: Evidence from China

Optimizing the allocation of university resources to improve the efficiency of inputs and outputs is an important issue for the high-quality development of universities. In recent years, China has become an important growth pole for the development of global higher education. In particular, Chinese agricultural universities, with their distinctive disciplinary characteristics and outstanding professional advantages, have made important contributions to the sustainable development of agricultural education around the world. In contrast, academic research on the efficiency of resource allocation in Chinese agricultural universities is very limited. To fill this gap, this study was guided by econometrics and took high-level agricultural universities in China as the research object to measure the effects of financial investment, disciplinary differences, and development level on the level of resource allocation efficiency of universities. With the help of a data envelopment model (DEA) and a Malmquist index decomposition model, we found that the overall level of resource allocation efficiency in the sample universities was high, but there were great disparities in resource input–output effectiveness between universities. In many universities, marginal inputs exceeded marginal outputs, resulting in input redundancy and resource wastage. In addition, this study shows that for high-level agricultural universities, the regression of capital input technology is preventing a sustained increase in productivity, which places the total factor productivity of resource allocation in a diminishing state.