Performance-Based Funding

Organisational funding is now frequently tied to organisational performance. In organisational terms, there are two primary types of universities globally—(1) those that exist to make a financial [Page 1159]profit for their private owners and (2) those that are ‘public’ in the sense that they have no private owners and no one can remove any profits from them—all surpluses are reinvested in the organisation. The primary measure of the performance of private, for-profit universities is profitability because, without that, the university, like any other commercial firm, cannot function. These universities are, therefore, subject to the performance-based funding of the market and are not the focus of this entry, which looks only at the more complex performance-based funding in public universities. In public universities, performance-based funding refers ...