Much of the criticism of higher education involves demands for greater efficiency. In certain areas, such critiques are valid; in others, they are misguided. Often the criteria and measurements used are misleading. In presenting the perspective of a large university, three erroneous means of increasing efficiency are highlighted, including: (1) the use of overly simplistic measures of efficiency; (2) short-run responses to each fluctuation in program enrollment; and (3) insistence on institutional or system-wide uniformity. Special considerations of the large university, in order to deal with efficiency, are the university budget, trying to achieve efficiency through increasing uniformity, the range in program and faculty quality, and the range in student quality. Areas to begin to improve efficiency and effectiveness include departmental reviews, central university monitoring of course and program proliferation, cost analysis and comparison among institutions, conversion of the institutional budgeting process into an effective management reporting system, resensitizing the system to rewarding improvement, tenure and retirement decisions, position control at the provost's level, annual enrollment forecasting down to departmental levels, training workshops for chairmen and assistant deans, good research and development in instructional improvement, reexamination of academic governance and grievance processes, the education of bureaucrats, the education of faculty groups, and bridging boundaries of disciplines. (MJM)