Academic performance and burnout: an efficient frontier analysis of resource use efficiency among employed university students

We examine the impact of university student burnout on academic achievement. With a longitudinal sample of working undergraduate university business and economics students, we use a two-step analytical process to estimate the efficient frontiers of student productivity given inputs of labour and capital and then analyse the potential determinants of technical efficiency. Employing a data envelopment analysis (DEA), we find that student efficiency varies by type of course, with quantitative courses such as economics, having the highest level of dispersion. The longitudinal analysis indicates that both university-related exhaustion and work-related exhaustion are negatively related to student productivity.