New Zealand Switching to Performance-based Funding for University R&D

Competition for state, federal and industrial funding to support university research is increasingly fierce in the U.S. Growing interest in developing academic research capacity, eroding state support for higher education and federal R&D budgets barely keeping pace with inflation, let alone absorbing the growing percentage dedicated to Congressional earmarks, are some of the reasons. Universities or investigators able to claim being the "best" based on some sort of respected ranking could help influence state legislators, reviewers in a federal competition, or decision makers within industrial R&D facilities.

New Zealand is about to launch an alternative, and radical in U.S. terms, approach to allocating federal research support to its universities, the $18 million Performance-based Research Fund (PBRF). Universities that previously received funding allocations according to student enrollment — similar to how most U.S. states support higher education — will now see funding disbursed through PBRF, which grades the quality of research produced within each institution.

Quality of teaching is not included, and the report has stirred controversy over the government’s use of the findings and its comparison to international institutes. Completed in 2003 by the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC), the report is meant to provide incentives to increase the average quality of research, said the Ministry of Education.

Modeled after the United Kingdom’s Research Assessment Exercise (REA), which assesses the quality of research in universities and colleges in the UK, the PBRF grades universities with an A, B, C or R, ranging from world class to research inactive. Universities receive grades based on the level in which they reward and encourage the quality of researchers (60 percent), reflect research degree completions (25 percent), and reflect external research income (15 percent).

As with the PBRF in New Zealand, federal research funds also are distributed to universities in the UK in response to the findings of the REA, which takes place every 4-5 years.

Originally set to be released on March 17, the TEC report was held up by a petition to the High Court from the University of Auckland and the Victoria University of Wellington. The universities did not want an international comparison between New Zealand and British universities to appear within the report because they felt a comparison would be both difficult and flawed.

Jonathan Boston, a political scientist from Victoria University, told the universities’ research committee that raw data on research quality for New Zealand would look very bad compared to British universities, the New Zealand Herald reported. Boston helped create the grading system.

The High Court found that TEC breached the universities’ expectations by proposing to publish the comparison without consulting them. In response, TEC removed the section in which New Zealand universities fared poorly in comparison.

Another concern raised by the New Zealand Association of University Staff, the country’s major academic union, is the report’s findings could lead to perverse decisions on government support for universities, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education. The association also criticized the system for having a bias toward high-cost subjects over high-quality scores.

Official findings from the PBRF report indicate the University of Auckland placed first, followed by the University of Canterbury, the Victoria University of Wellington and the University of Otago. The Performance Based Research Fund report is available at: http://www2.tec.govt.nz/funding/research/pbrf/pbrf.htmf

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