A MILP model for the long term academic staff size and composition planning in public universities

Abstract

This paper proposes a model for dealing with the long term staff composition planning in public universities. University academic staff is organized in units (or departments) according to their field of expertise. The staff for each unit is distributed in a set of categories, each one characterized by their teaching hours, cost and other specificities. Besides the use for planning (and updating a plan), the model can be used to assess the impact that different strategies may have on the personnel costs and the structure of a university. The proposed model is formulated generally, so it can be applied to different types of universities attending to their characteristics. The model is applied to a real case and validated by means of a computational experiment considering several scenarios. The analysis is focused on achieving a preferable academic staff composition under service level constraints while also minimizing the associated economic expenditures considering a long term horizon. The results show that the model successes in approaching the staff composition to a previously defined pattern preferable one. staff in the medium or short term is very limited (due both to regulations on promotions and hiring and to the difficulty in finding people with enough expertise and knowledge in some areas); and second, because the available budget to use on staff decisions (mainly on hiring and promotions) is tight, especially in situations of economic crisis like the actual one, with public funding becoming lower and lower. Resources have to be used in an efficient way, and this means leading to the workforce (size and composition) that covers the needs of the organization in an appropriate way, which obviously is not possible if a correct staff plan is designed in advance. Besides, it is important to note that the staff planning in universities is also a very relevant problem for other reasons, such as the competition to attract the best professors, pupils and research funding (Taylor and Miroiu, 2002).The numerous changes (both external and internal) that Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have been facing during the last decades motivated for the first time in the eighties of the 20 th century the development of the strategic management in universities (based on the experiences in companies). In the eighties also took place the widely movement of NPM (New Public Management), which hold the hypothesis that market oriented management of the public sector would lead to greater cost-efficiency for governments, without having negative side-effects on other objectives and considerations (Hood, 1991). However, the staff planning was not included in the strategic management (Llinàs-Audet et al., 2010). Several universities have carried out actions for the definition of the strategic planning. That is why the strategic staff planning in universities is a hot topic and very timely. In this sense, and as Hunt et al. (1997) pointed out, the strategic staff planning would permit universities to optimize their resources, thus achi...

Evaluating the impact of strategic personnel policies using a MILP model: The public university case

“…These aspects are detailed in previous works: de la Torre et al (2014Torre et al ( , 2016. All of them are translated into a set of data, parameters and constraints, all defining a mathematical model for optimization (see Section 3).…”

“…Figure 1. Evolution of the academic career (de la Torre et al, 2016) The evaluation criteria for the optimization problem, as previously noted in the introduction, is two-fold: i) to minimize personnel costs; and ii) to determine a workforce pyramid according to a preferable one, or university model. In regard of the first evaluation criteria, this paper considers diverse personnel expenditures such as salaries, hiring and dismissals.…”

“…The problem has been modelled by using MILP, based on de la Torre et al (2014Torre et al ( , 2016. The readers are referred to these works for a detailed description of the model.…”

Evaluation of the impact of strategic staff planning in a university using a MILP model

“…Titova and Shutov (2014) present a predictive model for the workforce size considering aspects as the quality of the educational services, the level of development of research activities, the public image of the university as well as the financial issues. Recently, de la Torre et al (2016) propose a methodology to deal with the strategic staff planning in public universities. The proposed methodology includes a mathematical model for optimising the university workforce in a long-term horizon.…”

“…So from the above description of the state of the art, and to the best of our knowledge, there are no studies in the scientific literature to deal with the determination of the size and composition of the staff in a public university, except de la Torre et al (2016). But none of them analyses the consequences of the strategic policies taken beforehand by universities.…”