On the Dependence of Drop-Out Rates on Cohort Size in Public Universities

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between the number of graduates at a university for a particular year and the size of this cohort when they entered the University. We focus on publicly funded Universities in which student fees are heavily subsidized by the Government and hence finance plays a smaller role for applicants. In fact, in some countries, fees at Government funded universities have not changed over the last decade. If such universities, consider profit as their main objective then they may accept too many candidates, and this will lead to high dropout rates. However, since these Universities are publicly funded by their respective Governments, their objective should instead be to maximize the number of students that successfully graduate (sometimes called the Goodput of a process). We investigate this relationship and propose a simple model that we believe represents it. Note that we acknowledge that many other factors play a role, but our objective is simply to illustrate that, increasing the number of students may in fact cause a reduction in graduates. In fact, we see this in the many examples that we investigated.