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Evaluating student allocation in the Portuguese public higher education system

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Abstract

This paper characterizes and evaluates the student allocation in the Portuguese public higher education system. It describes the supply and demand sides of the system by looking at the numerus clausus across areas of study and institutions, institutions’ degree of diversity, and performance and adjustment indicators based on students’ revealed preferences. Performance indicators quantify the adequacy between demand and supply, across institutions and fields of study, and gauge the performance of public higher education institutions in the competition for candidates. Adjustment indicators allow us to predict the potential impact of changes in higher education regulations on student allocation and its stability. According to these indicators, such changes could result in an expansion for some institutions and fields of study, whereas other institutions might face a reduction.

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Notes

  1. It is important to note that there is no single higher education market, instead there is a multitude of markets: namely, a market for students, for researchers, for lecturers, for scholarships and grants, for graduates, among others (Jongbloed 2003). In the present study, we concentrate on a specific market: the market for undergraduate students, which will be the one referred to when speaking of market.

  2. According to the MCTES (2006), enrolments in the private subsystem represent about 26% of the total enrolments in graduate and pos-graduate studies.

  3. New study programmes in private institutions are subject to very strict requirements, and institutions must be officially recognised in order to award degrees.

  4. In the private sector there is a decentralized application system.

  5. For example, the reintroduction of minimum marks (95/200), in 2004, coincided with a reduction of candidates and enrolments (MCTES 2006).

  6. Note that fees represent about 22% and 18% of the total monthly expenditure of university and polytechnic students (MCTES 2006).

  7. The information is available at: http://www.acessoensinosuperior.pt.

  8. This index is used in Brose (2003), who took it from Magurran, in his work dated from 1988 on ecological diversity measurement.

  9. The creation of a new university requires a minimum of 8 study programmes in at least three different areas of study, whereas a polytechnic can be created with just two study programmes, which may belong to the same area of study (Simão et al. 2004).

  10. ISCTE is a specialised school, where most studies are concentrated in two fields: Law and Social Sciences, and Economics and Management.

  11. Consistency, however, should not be understood by its usual meaning in Microeconomic theory.

  12. An individual has a polytechnic choice set if his choice set only contains polytechnic schools.

  13. More detailed data on regional consistency is shown in Portela et al. (2007).

  14. See note 1, Table 5.

  15. If we recomputed the diversity index for the University of Lisbon, considering the intended merger, we would find that it increased from 0.785 to 0.863, taking into account computations based on the places available in each field of study.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Alberto Amaral for his comments on a previous version of this paper. We also benefited from comments and suggestions from participants of the NIPE Seminar, Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade do Minho, NIPE and IZA, Braga, Portugal

    Miguel Portela

  2. Universidade do Minho and NEGE, Braga, Portugal

    Nelson Areal, Ana Carvalho & Artur Rodrigues

  3. Universidade do Minho and NIPE and CIPES, Braga, Portugal

    Carla Sá

  4. Universidade do Minho and NIPE, Braga, Portugal

    Fernando Alexandre & João Cerejeira

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  1. Miguel Portela
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  2. Nelson Areal
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  3. Carla Sá
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  4. Fernando Alexandre
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  5. João Cerejeira
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  6. Ana Carvalho
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  7. Artur Rodrigues
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Correspondence to Carla Sá.

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Portela, M., Areal, N., Sá, C. et al. Evaluating student allocation in the Portuguese public higher education system. High Educ 56, 185–203 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-007-9097-x

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