Abstract:
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In the last years, Spain has seen an increase in the number of students enrolled at the
university. This project aspires to understand the market of undergraduate studies in the
Spanish system, to define a proper context for the study of competition in this market and to
calculate and evaluate this competition.
The first phase of this work will involve the recollection of information that will allow the
future study. This gathering will include the definition of topics such as market, competition
and geographic accessibility, and the description of the Spanish market of undergraduate
studies, with a focus on the students’ habits and the available sources of information that will
be used.
Once this ground has been built, the most relevant indicators of competition and geographical
accessibility will be introduced. It will be necessary to consider the scope of the project in
order to make a viable proposal of the indicators that will be used in the study.
Finally, the data study will be carried out. In order to do so, a database with all the study
centres in Spain will be generated. Then, the relation between different categories of study
centres will be studied, which together with a proper methodology will allow the calculation of
accessibility and competition. Six different cases for each category will be studied (3 different
radius, together with 2 substitution hypotheses), which will allow analysing the competition
performance from different angles. Microsoft Excel will be the main program used for our
project, because it includes all the needed formulas and it has the potential to produce long
calculations. Some analysis will use Minitab, especially for the representation of data.
After the calculations have been carried out, the results will be added to the report via a
Spanish map, which will provide a powerful way of visualization. Some additional analysis may
be carried out in order to better understand the overall performance.
To conclude, some relation between competition and other factors is found, such as quality of
studies and population of a province. It is important to notice that the main goal of the project
is to develop an initial analysis of the Undergraduate studies’ state in Spain, and therefore, this
study may serve as a basis for future research on the topic. |