澳大利亚高等教育的成本函数[文献翻译].doc

本科毕业论文（设计） 外 文 翻 译 原文： A Cost Function for Higher Education in Australia (extract) 1. Introduction This study estimates a cost function for higher education in Australian universities. The estimated function is used to examine the cost of providing higher education to overseas students. In the higher education sector, production functions are useful for evaluating the structure of the industry and can serve as guides for individual institutions on policies affecting their size and scope. Moreover, in view of the relaxation of provisions under which universities can provide higher education to full-fee paying domestic students, information from cost functions can assist institutions to develop appropriate pricing strategies. Cost functions also provide an opportunity to evaluate the cost of providing higher education to overseas students. Higher education costs for an individual university can be established from a detailed accounting exercise in which the explicit and implicit costs allocated to courses and levels are collected. However, in obtaining the costs of overseas students, there is still be a need for a cost function because it is necessary to examine what the costs would be under alternative student numbers, that is, with and without overseas students. Some idea of the variation in costs with different numbers can be obtained by comparing universities at the same date but with different student profiles. Hence the use of cost functions provides a method for measuring the net benefits(or costs)of the providing education to overseas students. The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 reviews some of the previous work done on the Australian higher education sector and discusses some relevant issues. Section 3 presents the basic cost function model, describes the data and presents empirical results. Section 4 presents results from the application of the cost function, including the costs predictions for the provision of higher education for overseas stud