Abstract
Graduation rates (GRs) remain one of the most frequently applied measures of institutional performance. This paper analyzes the relationship between university characteristics and GRs in Spain, using a dataset for the entire public university system over the period 1998–2008. Since we observe the same university over several years, we address the problem of institutional unobserved heterogeneity for the first time. The main findings that can be drawn from our results are that university features, such as expenditure, student–teacher ratio and financial-aid to students are important in accounting for GRs. Surprisingly, student ability has no significant impact explaining graduation, a result that can be justified given the features of the Spanish university system.
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Besides controlling more effectively for unobserved heterogeneity, panel estimations are clearly more efficient than pooled ones, providing smaller standard errors and narrower confidence intervals.
This idea is known as the skill-biased technological change hypothesis, which affirms that there is considerable complementarity between new technologies and skilled labour.
These are the main laws governing the system. There has been an intensive legislation activity that accounts for a great number of minor laws and royal decrees passed to “fine tune” the above-mentioned framework laws.
In 2008 it was replaced by two nation-wide bodies, the General Conference on University Policy (CGPU) and the Council of Universities (CU) each one with specific objectives. The CGPU has the mission to set out the general directives for university policy while the CU addresses the academic aspects of the Spanish university system.
Tenured professors are civil servants and they are subject to the same salary categories as other public employees. Nevertheless, they can obtain complements according to differences in regional standards of living.
Even if the new funding mechanism was introduced in 2007, its effects did not take place during our period of analysis. Moreover, non-recurrent funding still represents a small proportion of income for public universities. Therefore, any suspicion of simultaneity between graduation rates and funding can be ruled out.
About 35 % of students were enrolled on short-cycle programs in 2007 (INE 2009).
The degree structure described above underwent a major revision introduced by the amendment of the LOU in 2007 to adjust to the requirements of the Bologna Declaration. Universities have been given freedom to define curricula, ending with a long tradition by which the state retained control over the curriculum of each official degree in order to ensure “national diplomas”.
Secondary education in Spain is divided into two stages, middle school, which is compulsory; and high school which is not compulsory.
According to OECD data, public subsidies to households as % of GDP for tertiary education in Spain remained constant during the analysed period (0.10 % in 1998, and 0.11 in 2008). The mean for OECD countries was three times as high (0.27 % in 1998, and 0.28 in 2008).
The cohort-graduation rate is the usual measure of graduation rate in the literature. For instance, Webber and Ehrenberg (2010) use the 6-year graduation rate for students who entered the institution as full-time first-year students 6 years earlier. Other alternatives of widespread use are net or gross graduation rates, and Graduation/Successful completion. Calculation details can be seen in the OECD publication “Education at a Glance”.
One referee suggested the use of disaggregated expenditure instead of the weighted graduation rate as defined here. We agree that this could be a desirable way to proceed to capture differences at the degree level. Unfortunately, Spanish universities' budgets do not have that level of disaggregation (or at least the information is not publicly available). Hence, with the data we have at hand, we decided to aggregate graduation data in order to have a unique indicator per university and, since we know some shares of the distribution of first-year enrollment and students per type of degree we can construct a not-so-bad proxy of this outcome variable per institution. The alternative suggested by the referee required arbitrarily disaggregating expenditure data per type of degree. This would introduce more noise and bias since the only indicator we can use to guide any possible disaggregation method is the number of students per type of degree. This remains, nevertheless, a very interesting point and a suggestion for future research and we thank the referee for pointing this out to us.
Henceforth, graduation rate. i = university, j = cycles (undergraduate—long and short cycle, and graduate—Master and PhD), t = year.
Table 6 in appendix depicts the details used to build the explanatory variables.
All financial data used in the study are expressed in per enrolled-student terms and have been adjusted to 2001 values.
Alternatively, some specifications include the total number of student (tot_stu it ) which is the sum of Undergra_stu it and Grad_stu it .
For sake of brevity some FE estimations are not reported here. They are, however, available from the authors upon request.
Moreover, a basic econometric problem is that the variable student ability does not vary much across both universities and years. The greater the variation in a variable across observation, the more accurately one can estimate the effects of that variable on an educational outcome.
As mentioned, these dummies seek to control for differences in university policy across regions.
The variable fee was dropped from the regressions in Table 2 due to problems of collinearity.
fees and supp_stu were excluded because of collinearity.
We adopt the second estimator (RIF-Logit regression), its main advantage being that it allows heterogeneous marginal effects.
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García-Estevez, J., Duch-Brown, N. Student Graduation in Spain: To What Extent Does University Expenditure Matter?. Res High Educ 55, 308–328 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-013-9312-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-013-9312-9