Performance Agreements in Higher Education: A New Approach to Higher Education Funding

Abstract

The allocation of public funding to higher education has been increasingly subject to debates and change in recent decades. The changes have often been linked to changing beliefs and conceptions about how the public sector should be steered and managed. The backdrop to this was the New Public Management (NPM) approach to governing public organizations (Ferlie et al. 1996) which argues that the public sector should be addressed with similar management tools as the private sector. Under NPM, the predominant steering approach in European higher education systems has emphasized decentralization, with higher education institutions (HEIs) enjoying a large autonomy and receiving a lump sum budget from their funding authorities. To a large extent, HEIs are autonomous in areas such as the provision of educational programmes, managing their research portfolio, their human resources and their asset and property portfolio. This governance approach may be characterized as "state supervision steering" (Van Vught 1989). The government limits itself to a restricted number of "framework steering" elements: setting the tuition fees and distributing student financial support; organizing quality assurance of

Improving study success and diversity in Dutch higher education using performance agreements

“…But what is clear is that the agreements have lost whatever they included in terms of new public management ingredients. That ambitions are to be agreed in close dialogue with the universities' relevant (local) stakeholders implies that the agreements will develop more into a steering instrument that fits the public value management paradigm (Stoker 2006;Jongbloed et al 2018a).…”

The Causal Impact Of Performance-Based Funding On University Performance: Quasi-Experimental Evidence From A Policy In Russian Higher Education

“…As higher education yields feature of both public and private goods, it relies on investments from three main sources: (i) public financing, (ii) private support and (iii) tuition fees. Despite the fact that a shift from public to private funding is being observed today (Jongbloed et al, 2018), state funding remains the core source income for universities in most countries (OECD 2016), which holds for countries with a non-Anglo-American HE systems in particular. Public funding is a crucial condition for the functioning and performance of HEIs (Elbasir & Siddiqui, 2018), which makes the policies of public funding an important steering mechanism and one of the most widespread subjects of public policy debate (Parker, 2011).…”

“…However, the set of specific indicators included in the formula is often a debated choice, involving discussions about the effective measures of educational and research performance not via simple quantitative indications of some generated output, but the value added by a university. In any case, the composition of indicators used varies from one system to another and depends on the political agenda (Jongbloed, 2018).…”

“…In the USA, where the governance of the higher education system is carried out at the state level, 22 states have already adopted or are in the process of adopting of PBF (Nisar, 2015). Most European countries also actively utilize PBF principles (Wang, 2019), and even develop new performance-based funding modalities, such as political agreements based on performance indicators (Jongbloed et al 2018).…”

The issue of performance in Higher education institution - Community partnerships: A Canadian perspective

“…Widespread implementation of performance-based metrics and funding are part of the transition presently underway (see de Boer et al, 2015;Jongbloed, Kaiser, van Vught, & Westerheijden, 2018a). While research and teaching are most pronounced in terms of performance indicators (Jongbloed et al, 2018a;Kivistö & Kohtamäki, 2015), the importance of relationships between Higher education institution (HEI) and the community is increasingly emphasised (e.g., Bawa & Munck, 2012;Tremblay, 2017;Weerts & Sandmann, 2010). There is a growing need for HEIs strongly committed to community partnerships to assess their performance (Holton, Jettner, & Shaw, 2015).…”