Performance of universities - future for governance
A new European Commission report has attempted to establish a more valid comparative methodological approach to research assessment and university 'ranking' systems. As the report notes, the major criticism of current ranking mehtodologies, that aggregate evaluastion data into a single digit, is that they only really focus on the top 100 ranked institutions and do not provide a coherent guide to research policy development and funding for the thousands of universities in Europe and worldwide.
Calling for a more fine-tuned methodology, the EU Commission sought a multidimensional methodology to capture more dimensions of academics' work and identify the types of users of measurements of the quality of university-based research. The report's authors say competitive funding "should be based on institutional evaluation systems and on diversified performance indicators".
The methodology recommended by the report, relevant to the 17,000 higher education institutions around the world, is an assessment based on fit-for-purpose, with combined quantitative indicators and data with qualitative information undertaken at the level of 'knowledge clusters'.
The report is available here.
Governance and performance of universities
A report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, titled The Governance and Performance of Research Universities: Evidence from Europe and the US, investigates how university governance affects research output, measured by patenting and international university research rankings.
The authors, from Harvard, Stanford, Université Libre de Bruxelles and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, generate several measures of governance and competitive funding over decades for both Europe and America. They show that university autonomy from state policy and open competition for research resources are positively correlated with university output. They conclude
The most natural overall interpretation of our results is that frontier research is a complex thing that a university can only pursue effectively if it has the discretion to direct resources and researchers towards what it believes are the most promising paths. Universities will put more effort into directing resources well if they knows that rewards are allocated based on competition, especially competition that is strictly merit-based.
The paper is available from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Social Science Research Network
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