Redistribution of Funds for Teaching and Research among Universities

Abstract

The Ministry of Science and Research of the state of North-Rhine Westphalia has initiated a procedure for the performance- and success-based redistribution of funds for teaching and research among universities. The fundamental procedure to determine a solution for this decision situation that is accepted by all universities may be described as a three-level decision process with multiple objectives. The three decision levels are the ministry, the rectors’ council and the individual universities. Criteria for a performance- and success-oriented distribution of funds in teaching are the proportions of academic personnel employed, the proportions of students in the first 4 semesters, and the proportions of graduates. Criteria for assessing successful research are the proportions of outside funds and the proportions of PhDs.

Given these criteria, the solution process consists of agreeing on the weights for the criteria. Here, the ministry prefers the proportions of students in the first 4 semesters and the proportions of graduates. On the other hand, at the rectors’ council weights are sought that do not cause the re-distribution of the budget for teaching and research to deviate too much from the actual distribution of funds among universities. Each individual university, however, is interested in weights that lead to its receiving the lion’s share of the redistribution budget.

Distance minimizing, linear programming with multiple objectives and goal programming are the mathematical approaches with whose help the problem of redistribution among universities can be coped with practically on the basis of real data. The findings derived with these methods will then be compared with the realized solutions.