This paper demonstrates that substantial economies may be expected in per-student costs at the University of Bradford as the number of undergraduates increases. Further details may be obtained from the authors.
Components of Cost per Student
Output-budgeting techniques have been used to distribute the total costs of university operation to the various outputs produced -first degree students by discipline, postgraduates and research. As well as current expenditure, these costs include the imputed annual rental of the university's buildings.
Attribution of joint-costs proved extremely complicated and involved detailed studies of the timetabled use of classrooms and laboratories for the several courses, and a study of the distribution of academic staff time between various activities conducted by a "diary" method.
As expected, laboratory-based courses in science and engineering were considerably more expensive than classroom-based courses in social sciences. The cost of educating an undergraduate to first degree level in science or engineering ranged from s in the lowest-cost discipline to s in the highest, as against s to s in different social science disciplines.
What was surprising was that capital and maintenance costs constituted a high proportion of total cost per student. They varied between 27 and 49 percent, depending upon the course involved. Teaching costs (academic and technical staff costs, and materials) were between 22 and 53 percent of the total. The residue comprised administrative, library and miscellaneous costs.
Economies of Scale in Academic Staff Costs
Detailed studies were made of the teaching structure of nine undergraduate courses in terms of: