Departament d'Humanitats i Ciències de l'Educació

As we enter the 21st century, the social dimension of Higher Education is one of the key elements in university policies. Among measures aimed at retaining students, scholarship and study grant policies help to ensure equality. In Spain, the establishment of the Study Aid Programme (PAE) for degree studies is an outstanding innovative initiative. This study is aimed at assessing the importance of the PAE as an economic factor in equity, access and academic performance in the fi rst year at university. The data used is that available on all students who began degree studies at Abat Oliba CEU University from the 2009-10 academic years to the 2015-16 academic years. The results confi rm that obtaining a scholarship becomes an incentive that infl uences key aspects for persistence, such as the degree of eff ort and educational commitment with positive results on students’ performance.

The university is an essential institution for the progress and modernization of society. The higher education sector has seen growing demand in recent decades, as well as a progressive internationalization. This implies greater possibilities to choose between universities and greater competitiveness among these institutions. In recent years, we have observed growing interest in developing university quality rankings. Accordingly, the main objective of our research is to propose a model for obtaining rankings with optimal properties: a ranking of universities according to teaching output, research output and global output will be established, to classify all universities, regardless of their size or their public or private nature. The multi-strategic methodology is applied from a systemic approach combining quantitative elements from a global and specific perspective of Ibero-American universities. A database has been developed that includes indicators and ratios based on information from the MECD and the National Commission for the Evaluation of Research Activity (CNEAI): teaching productivity, research productivity and overall productivity for each university. This ranking provides some novel indicators that would favor the appearance of new universities absent in the current rankings, a series of indicators that do not take into account volume, but rather performance. The results indicate that the impact of the Teaching dimension is greater because this is the dimension in which universities that do not currently appear in the rankings could stand out.