Keeping up Performances: an international survey of performance-based funding in higher education

This paper presents an overview of government policies for funding higher education in 11 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. In particular, it describes the mechanisms for funding the university sector and the extent to which the grants to universities are oriented on performance. Are universities funded on the basis of what they produce in terms of graduates and research outputs? And what is the share of public funding supplied through research councils? Although in recent decades the attention paid to issues of efficiency, effectiveness and quality has increased, there are only few governments that explicitly link universities' resources to universities' results in the areas of teaching and research. This is illustrated by means of a graph. A number of tentative reasons for the popularity of enrollments-based funding approaches are presented in the final section of the paper.