Institutional Adaptation to Government Policy and its Social Costs

The project is five years project funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea and the research funding is supported under the project name of the Funding Outstanding Scholars. The project is going to be continued five years from May 2017 to April 2022. This research explores how state mobilizes higher education institutions through its policy, especially assessment-based funding policies and how higher education institutions responds to these assessment-based funding policies. This study tries to extract patterns of institutional responses and theoretical implications for policy compliance of higher education institutions. In addition, this study will estimate the costs accompanied by the assessment-based funding policy that higher education institutions spend though the expanses are not necessarily used for their education and research; however, higher education institutions spend those costs to respond to government policies. This project will be expanded its scope from a national study in S. Korea to two other higher education systems (Japan and Taiwan) in East Asia where state heavily replies on assessment-based funding policies to accomplish its policy goals. Through this research, we expect to theorize policy mechanisms from bottom-up perspectives and propose the policy approach in the field of higher education.