翻弄される運営費交付金 : 成果連動型評価の曖昧な成果

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impacts of performance-based funding evaluation (PFE), which was introduced after the incorporation of national universities in Japan, on the delivery of operating grants and expenses for education and research. To this end, we examined the impact of the two different types of PFE. The first is an achievement evaluation based on key performance indicators (KPIs) and the second is the relative evaluation based on objective and common indicators introduced suddenly in the middle of the 2021 fiscal year. The major findings are as follows.
First, under the current complicated evaluation system, after controlling for the input indicator (faculty number), both the priority support (KPI) and objective/common indicators do not influence the operating grants. Nevertheless, under the zero-sum game of the PFE system, winners of the game can reallocate grants to president’s discretionary expenses, but losers have no other way to reduce departmental basic expenses. It is no wonder that the local national universities are shrinking in size under the ambiguous PFE system.
Secondly, the objective/common indicators, such as numbers of PhDs awarded and competitive funding, are more sensitive to the research expenses than other expenses beyond the type of university grouping. If that is the case, then reallocation by PFE based on research-oriented indexes may damage regional national universities, in particular. However, this finding is suspected of reverse causality because it is obtained by cross-sectional data. So, universities with higher research spending are more likely to obtain PhDs and secure competitive funding despite their location.
Thirdly, to overcome this reverse causality and to confirm the fact that the finances of regional national universities are particularly tight, we performed time-fixed data analysis (2005-2021) for three priority support groups (regional, special and research) to reduce any macro shocks that affect the relationship between teacher personnel expenses and educational expenditure per student. The result shows that in regional national universities there is a trade-off relationship between teacher personnel expenses and educational expenditure per student. This paper concludes with considerations for future research on the performance funding and visualization of the cost of national universities.