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Abstract
Recognizing the strategic relevance of higher education, various countries have established ambitious objectives for the percentage of graduates in their population by 2020. In some cases, without effective policies aimed at increasing domestic rates of participation in higher education, such goals will not be met. However, successful measures are difficult to design and to implement when the phenomena they target are complex and encompass many personal, cultural, social and economic variables. Such is the case of aggregate demand for higher education. Therefore, a precise knowledge of its more likely influences is indispensable to perform the forecasting exercises required to inform the process of policy design and, subsequently, to monitor its success. In this paper, we employ the partial least-squares regression, which allows modelling with many variables even with relatively few observations, to identify the most relevant determinants of aggregate demand for higher education in Portugal. Our choice of country is dictated by the availability of adequate data but our results, suggesting that the most important factors are policy dependent, and may thus be managed to support strategic educational objectives, may be useful in other national contexts.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank an anonymous referee for valuable comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Manuela Oliveira is a Professor at the Department of Mathematics at the Universidade de Évora and a researcher at CIMA.
Carlos Vieira and Isabel Vieira are Professors at the Department of Economics of the Universidade de Évora and researchers at CEFAGE.
Notes
1. To apply to a Portuguese public institution, candidates enter a national contest where they rank their preferences for six pairs of institution/study programmes and compete for a fixed number of places, assigned in accordance to grades. The Portuguese higher education system is highly regulated, with ministerial approval required, inter alia, to create new institutions and study programmes, to define the number of offered places for each study programme or the interval within which institutions are allowed to set tuition fees. The number of available places in the public sector is defined by a system of quotas (designated as numerus clausus). Private universities and polytechnic schools are, with a few exceptions, still mainly sought out by those whose grades are not high enough to allow entry to a public institution.
2. The adoption of the Bologna guidelines may have impacted admissions to higher education in various ways, but perhaps mainly due to a shortening of degree cycles, an increase in the percentage of elective courses and a greater emphasis on employability.
3. Data sources: The unemployment rate and the real disposable income series are taken from the Portuguese central bank, Banco de Portugal, statistical database. Total spending in education as a percentage of GDP and the wage premium were collected from the Ministry of Finance. The wage premium was proxied by the difference between the starting wages in the public sector for secondary education and higher education graduates. The minimum wage, employed to weigh tuition fees, is available at the Ministry of Solidarity, Employment and Social Security. The proportion of population holding a higher education degree was retrieved from the Portuguese official statistical office, INE – Instituto Nacional de Estatística. The number of higher education institutions, the number of years of compulsory schooling, the average duration of study programmes and the percentage of programmes adapted to the Bologna guidelines were estimated using various government reports and statistical databases. All other variables were collected from the statistical offices of the Ministry of Education and Science.
4. We use version 12.0 of SIMCA-P (Umetrics, Umeå, Sweden).