A Relação entre a Escala e o Custo Médio por Aluno no Ensino Superior Privado de Belo Horizonte

Abstract

   The main purpose of this work was to verify if exists economies of scale in a private activity of higher education taking Belo Horizonte as the city base. In this direction, a bibliographical and a documentary research was developed projecting the average costs per pupil from the minimum structure of a private institution for higher education, concluding with the data analysis from two effects: (a) the scale effect, presupposing the same organizational structure, and; (b) the organizational, considering the college, the university center and the university itself. The conclusions of this study indicate that related to the scale effect, the values of the average costs per pupil showed up a decrease from the increasing of the scale of the institution, indicating the presence of a scale economy. Regarding the organizational effect it was noticed that the average cost per pupil has raised at the occasion of the structural change between the university center and the university, however demonstrating its reduction when the scale in the university has increased, indicating, again, the presence of a scale economy. Finally, this work evidenced the possibility of evaluating the relation between the scale and the average cost per pupil from a private institution of higher education in a way to generate information which enables the managers to take decisions that result in a better utilization of the available resources and in a higher efficiency in the allocation of them.