A negative binomial model for student allocation to higher education in Portugal during the pre-Bologna period

Abstract

This paper aims to describe and characterize student allocation in the Portuguese public higher education system, namely in academic engineering programs, during the so-called pre-Bologna period.With this study, we achieved a better understanding ofsome of the variables which could describe the access to higher education engineering programs after the implementation of the Bologna process. The data used in this paper covers the years from 1997 to 2005 and was provided by the Portuguese Ministry of Education.We use regression analysis applied to count data, by estimating negative binomial models, and we obtained a satisfactory performance of the model.