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Archive for April 5th, 2010

Educational spending in the Netherlands – a thorough analysis of the indicators

Monday, April 5th, 2010

According to a new press release from Statistics Netherlands, “in the period 1997–2007 real expenditure by subsidized educational institutes increased by 9 billion euro, from 20 to 29 billion euro. Some 3.2 billion euro can be attributed to changes in demography and participation in education, and 5.8 billion euro to increased spending per participant” (Statistics Netherlands, 2010).

Statistics Netherlands managed breaking down the changes in spending on education, starting with two main explanatory factors and indicators:

# Participants in education
$ Spending per participant

The figure below shows which factors were analyzed and to what amount they contributed to the total change in spending on education in the period 1997–2007:

Source: Statistics Netherlands, 2010

The report realized by the Statistics Netherlands is complex, analyzing multiple measures that contribute to the education expenditure changes, explaining their calculation formula and the factors to consider when appreciating their value. For example, spending per participant consists both of :

material spending (equipment and educational tools, rent, energy, administration)
personnel spending, that dependents on the number of employees in fulltime equivalents (FTE) required per participant for the education, and on the costs per employee (FTE).

The graphic representation shows that the effect of most factors fluctuate from one year to another. In the graph each year is related to the start, 1997. This means that each annual change is added to that of the previous year, which results in a cumulative change.