Determining the Optimal Capacity for Student Admission among Public Universities in Iran

Through recent decades the higher education has seen tremendous growth in the world. Much of this is due to legal, economical, Justice and social needs responsive in all over the world. The number of college students has increased twelve times from 13 million in 1960 to 158.7 million in 2008. However, this expansion has faced limitations related to relevant norms in human, physical and financial resources. This study was designed with the purpose of specifying the capacity of students’ admission in the framework of descriptive method and a leaner planning model. In this regard three principal limitations of higher education expansion, and the appropriate adjustment of students’ admission based on “student scale” were calculated. The linear programming method indicated that student admission by public universities exceeded the optimum capacity. It was 2.7 times more than the optimum. The proposed policy recommendations were giving priority to higher education sector, increasing financial and legal supports, and paying more practical attention to this sector from planners, policy makers and Iranian authorities instead of lowering student admission.