Economies of Scale and Scope in Turkish Universities. ASHE Annual Meeting Paper.

This study examined the collegiate production and cost structures of the 28 universities in Turkey in order to estimate their degrees of economies of scale and scope. Multi-product cost functions were estimated for the collegiate production of teaching and research in order to determine the most efficient level and product-mix for differing types of colleges and for each individual university in Turkey. Three clusters of collegiate fields (social, health, and engineering sciences) were examined across 186 faculties within 28 universities through the use of a four-output quadratic cost function: undergraduate teaching, master and doctoral graduate levels of instruction, and research productivity. At the collegiate level, both ray- and product-specific economies of scale and global economies of scope were estimated. The data suggest that the scale and output-mix are the main determinants of the cost of teaching and research outputs. In addition the findings suggest that: (1) average incremental and marginal costs are generally highest for graduate instruction and research outputs and lowest for undergraduate instruction; (2) of the three fields, social sciences has the lowest costs across all categories and health sciences has the highest; (3) although costs generally follow levels of instruction, there are some significant exceptions, and (4) most outputs have shared resource uses and costs. (Contains 42 references.) (Author/JB)