Competition for Funding or Funding for Competition? Analysing the Dissemination of Performance-based Funding in European Higher Education and its Institutional Effects

ABSTRACT

Mass higher education has promoted the development of larger, costlier, and more heterogeneous systems. Like many public services, HE faced tight competition for funding, alongside pressures to become more efficient in their use of public funds. One major development in public funding has been the introduction of performance-based funding. In this paper, we analyse the dissemination of PBF in European HE and discuss its main institutional effects. We will start by discussing the rationales for the introduction of these financial incentives regarding the behaviour of HEIs and their organizational response to externally led stimuli. We then present the dissemination of PBF across European higher education and reflect about the main institutional effects of the dissemination of PBF. We present some concluding remarks about the management challenges created by the emphasis on competitive rationales in public HE.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• competition
• funding
• performance
• Europe
• institutions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Authority in HE has usually been exercised through collegial modes of governance associated with a high degree of decentralization (Amaral et al., 2002; Becher & Kogan, 1992). If this organizational fragmentation has contributed to give HEI significant adaptability and flexibility (Clark, 1983), it has also hindered the development of a strong level of authority at the central level of the institution in many HE systems (Neave, 2012).

2. For instance, it has also been noted an impact of competition for research funding in the level of stress experienced by researchers (Engels & Guns, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [UIDB/00757/2020 and PTDC/CED-EDG/5530/2020/01].