States’ Potential Enrollment of Adult Students: A Stochastic Frontier Analysis

Abstract

This study shows that financial aspects of state higher education policies, particularly tuition, have an impact on the level of enrollment of adult undergraduates within a state. This study also demonstrates how stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) can be utilized to examine the potential maximum enrollment of adult learners in postsecondary education and generate state-level scores that can be utilized to rank states according to the difference between the potential maximum and actual enrollment of adults in higher education.

Does econometric methodology matter to rank universities? An analysis of Italian higher education system

“…[75] and [45] as well as the relationship between fees and level of enrolment by Ref. [76]; MK is the market share measured as the ratio between the number of enrolments at university i and the total number of enrolments in the universities located in the same region, included for capturing the potential effects due to the presence of more concentration or competition between universities; indeed, the market structure of the HEIs could play an important role in calculating the efficiency, as an increase in competition in the higher education sector could lead to greater efficiency (see Refs. [45,77,78] for a discussion); YEAR FOND is the year of foundation of the university as a proxy for the level of tradition of a given HEIs as, according to [19]; it is often perceived that HEIs with a longer tradition have a better reputation, but it could also be the case that younger HEIs have more flexible and modern structures, assuring a more efficient performance; WOMEN is the number of females among students in order to test the relation between the gender composition of the students and universities' efficiency scores; GDP is the gross domestic product corresponding to the total production of economic goods and services, with the aim of controlling for the growth of the economic system, as the university location can be an important determinant of its performance (the idea that rich and poor areas offer different surroundings has been already explored, with alternate results, by Ref.…”