Performance-based funding in higher education: an international survey

This paper presents overview of government policies for funding higher education in eleven 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? While in recent decades the attention paid to issues of efficiency, effectiveness and quality has increased, there are only few governments that explicitly link the universities' resources to the 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 enrolments-based funding approaches are presented in the final section of this paper.