Do non-academic professionals enhance universities’ performance? Reputation vs. organisation

ABSTRACT

Universities are increasingly engaging with non-academic professionals in facilitating performance outcomes, reaffirming themselves as purposive organisations, i.e. institutions with the ability to organise strategically in the pursuit of goals and standards. However, there is little empirical evidence for the impact of professional staff on university performance. Drawing on a sample of 100 British universities, the author assesses whether the changes in the ratio of professional staff to students (from 2003 to 2011) influence subsequent university performance. The author finds that universities that are moderately increasing their share of professional staff display higher levels of degree completion, but no significant differences can be observed in terms of research quality, good honours degrees and graduate employability. University performance is largely determined by reputation, prestigious universities performing higher in all dimensions. The findings contribute to the emerging empirical research assessing the impact of professional staff in higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• University performance
• non-academic professionals
• reputation
• purposive organisational action
• UK

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The RAE started being conducted by the UK funding councils every five years since 1986 as a tool of evaluating research quality in British higher education institutions. In 2008 it was followed by the REF.

2 According to the HESA Guidelines for Staff,

Individuals can hold more than one contract with a provider and each contract may involve more than one activity. In analyses staff counts have been divided amongst the activities in proportion to the declared FTE [full-time equivalent] for each activity. This results in counts of full person equivalents (FPE). Staff FPE counts are calculated on the basis of contract activities that were active on 1 December of the reporting period (using the HESA staff contract population). (HESA Website, Definitions: Staff, accessed on 10 November 2017)

3 Examples include the ‘plateglass universities’ and the former Colleges of Advanced Technology achieving university status after the Robbins Report in 1963.

4 A sensitivity analysis was conducted in order to address the limited timespan for the change in entry standards. The model was re-run to predict university performance in 2017 based on the percentage change in entry standards from 2008 to 2017. The negative and significant relationship between the change in entry standards and university performance was replicated, this time for all dimensions of university performance. The finding supports the possibility that the existence of a positive relationship between entry standards and university performance solely at the cross-sectional level is an artifact of reputation, whereby performant students self-select into prestigious universities.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/J500045/1].