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Using success to measure quality in British higher education: which subjects attract the best‐qualified students?
Author(s) -
Leslie Derek
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
journal of the royal statistical society: series a (statistics in society)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.103
H-Index - 84
eISSN - 1467-985X
pISSN - 0964-1998
DOI - 10.1111/1467-985x.00280
Subject(s) - measure (data warehouse) , quality (philosophy) , subject (documents) , human capital , set (abstract data type) , dimension (graph theory) , ethnic group , higher education , mathematics education , psychology , computer science , econometrics , mathematics , economics , political science , data mining , library science , economic growth , law , epistemology , philosophy , pure mathematics , programming language
Summary. A theory is developed to measure the quality of applicants into UK higher education. It is based on the principle that more able applicants will self‐select into more difficult subject choices. The advantage is that it gives a unidimensional measure whereby different groups can easily be compared across any dimension of interest, e.g. men, women and the various ethnic groups. Here the relative quality of applicants and acceptances across 170 separate subject groups is calculated and discussed by using a data set with over 2 million observations. It, therefore, offers a way of achieving a more refined measure of the quality of human capital.