<p>The efficiency and productivity of the education sector have received great interest and attention from scholars in recent decades. While there are standard literature reviews on efficiency studies of the education sector, a bibliometric review that is similar in kind and on the higher education sector has not been conducted. The present study attempts to fill this gap by adopting a bibliometric approach to analyze 328 publications from the Scopus database covering the 1988–2021 period. In particular, the focus is on the nonparametric frontier analysis of the higher education sector. The results indicate that there has been continuous growth in the number of publications since the mid-2000s. Although most published work is from developed countries, more publications from China have been published in recent years. For historical reasons, publication contributors are clustered with quality collaborative work in European institutions. The majority of published work is found in economics and operations research journals. With new methodological developments, recent studies have adopted more advanced and complicated data envelopment analysis frameworks. Because of the availability of quality data, productive analysis of higher education institutions also considers the underlying forces of efficiency, and environmental factors are found to be most influential. In summary, the present bibliometric review provides a thorough understanding of the nature of the nonparametric productivity analysis of the higher education sector over recent decades and possible directions for development in the field.</p>