Financial Support and University Performance in Korean Universities: A Panel Data Approach

This study analyzes the relationship between governmental financial support and university performance to determine whether the former enhances the latter or if universities enhance performance to attain government financial support. The types of financial support to universities considered in this study include those from central and local governments. University performance is defined in terms of the job-finding rates of students, number of publications in South Korean academic journals per full-time faculty member, and number of publications in SCI journals per full-time faculty member. This study uses financial support data of 148 universities from 2009 to 2017. To investigate the relationship between university financial support and performance, we use panel Granger causality testing and panel vector auto-regressive modeling. The results show that both central and local governmental financial support have an endogenous association with students’ job-finding rates. However, local governmental financial support and research performance show a reverse causality association.