Given today's hurried pace of change in higher education and its institutions, it is imperative for the higher education research community to reflect on its current composition and resulting ability to understand and respond to the breadth and rapidity of that change. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to identify selected social and academic characteristics of the primary contributors (authors, editorial board members, and editors) to The Review of Higher Education, to categorize institutional affiliations of contributors via the Carnegie Classification System and to synthesize the data in a historical and sociological perspective. The contributions to The Review's articles, editorial board positions, and editorships in its first 25 years have predominantly been from male members of the higher education professoriate affiliated with and receiving doctoral degrees from major research universities ranked highest in the Carnegie Classification System. Trends toward greater gender and disciplinary representation, especially among author contributors, began to appear by the mid-point (1990s) of the study period.

This paper provides a systematic review of the literature that employs stochastic frontier analysis to measure the efficiency of higher education institutions. The overview opens with a look at the general development of the literature, before emphasis is laid on the methodical aspects. Focus is thereby placed on the necessary underlying assumptions and the employed specifications, discussing their advantages and drawbacks. Afterwards, the factors that were specified in the literature, including the input and output variables, as well as the determinants of efficiency, are discussed in detail. Based on the insights of the literature review, the paper highlights some of the existing deficiencies and ways forward. To our knowledge, the present study provides the first systematic review on the usage of the stochastic frontier analysis to measure efficiency in the higher education sector.