The Per-capita Cost of Training Undergraduate Medical Students in Shiraz School of Medicine, 2007

Cost-benefit analysis is a scientific method which helps policy makers to select a project among other projects, with the same defined goal, making sure that the chosen project has the maximum benefit with a fixed cost or the minimum cost with a fixed level of benefit. Therefore, universities should consume the resources more carefully and efficiently. This survey was conducted to provide documents for evidence based decision making for policymakers.

Having the cooperation of the admission office, the number of medical students was extracted and then with the assistance of university budgeting manager, total costs were extracted regarding education, research, cultural-recreational affairs and management emphasizing on medicine field. Finally, data was analyzed with Excel.

Our findings showed that the per capita cost in education was 268.3 million rials, in research, it was 13.25 million rials, and as for cultural-recreational affairs and management, it was 7.4 and 14.45million rials respectively. The sum of per capita costs was 303.4 million rials

The calculated cost is fivefold the amount which was allocated as a per capita cost. The total cost of the university was more than the amount allocated by the management and planning organization; this necessitates further revisions in allocating recourses to universities by management and planning organization.