Costs and Industrial Structure in Contemporary British Higher Education

Datos Bibliográficos

ID9705459
AutoresGeraint Johnes (0000-0002-8148-0629, Lancaster University, autor de correspondencia)
Año1997
Volumen107
Número442
Páginas727-737
Fecha de publicación1997-05-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Economic Journal (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0013-0133 • E-ISSN: 1468-0297
EditorialOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1111/j.1468-0297.1997.tb00038.x
OpenAlexW2105411970
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas11
Referencias citadas9

The National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, chaired by Sir Ron Dearing, is required to make recommendations on the future development of the purposes, shape, structure, size and funding of higher education in the United Kingdom. In this context a useful starting point is to ask what a cost‐efficient higher education system would look like at current output levels. How many universities should there be? How big should each institution be, and what is the efficient distribution of sizes of universities? How many of them should be involved in research? How many should involve themselves only in teaching? How concentrated should the provision of sciences be in the universities? This paper attempts to provide early answers to these question.1 It does so by extending the work of Johnes (1996) to include the former polytechnics and to address questions about industrial structure in higher education. The starting point is the estimation of a cost function appropriate to the context of a multi‐product organisation; this follows first the theoretical developments of Baumol (1977) and Baumol et al. (1982) and second the work on American universities by Cohn et al. (1989). Once the cost technology of a representative university has been evaluated, the results can be used to evaluate the optimal structure of industry; this is achieved here by extending the early work of Bain (1954) to the multi‐product context by using the heuristic methods of tabu‐search (Laguna et al. 1995; Punnen and Aneja, 1995)

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