Resumen de Assessing university performance and strategic paths in the presence of multiple objectives
Competitiveness and excellence heavily rely on the capacity of regions to innovate and transfer knowledge from academic institutions to society. In a scenario where these values acquire a growing importance, universities are called to expand their traditional objectives (teaching and research) by introducing in their objective function the so-called third stream mission. The efficient implementation of these goals is expected to increase the economic and social welfare of territories. This means that universities have turned into crucial engines for regional development. Consequently, universities have to reshape their structures and strategies to incorporate these new demands claimed by public administrations, practitioners, academics and other stakeholders in the society. As a result, it is important to question whether universities allocate their internal resources and capabilities effectively to cope with all the functions they are assumed to develop. In this context, the study of the ways through which universities align their resources in relation to the achievement of their multiple objectives has become a critical research issue, questioning if both environmental factors and internal resources and capabilities can explain performance differences in higher education institutions. Differences in size, geographical location and institutional frameworks depict a complex but challenging framework. The analysis of the contribution of higher education institutions to regional development has gained increased attention. Even though the number of studies dealing with this field of research is extensive, from their analysis it is possible to identify a theoretical and empirical gap in the modelling of universities¿ performance that takes into account its multidimensional nature. Therefore, this thesis aims to fill this gap by examining "what" universities do, "why" they do what they do, and "how" they do it. In particular, the contribution of this dissertation is three folded. First, we propose and define an objective function for public universities. Second, we identify the factors that best contribute to the achievement of teaching, research and knowledge transfer outcomes. Third, we assess university's performance and we scrutinise the different strategic behaviours followed by Spanish public universities. To this end, we carry out an exhaustive literature review, and we present a theoretical framework to model the objective function of universities. From this theoretical development our hypotheses emerge. We therefore propose a three-step empirical analysis to test our hypotheses, focusing the analysis on the Spanish public higher education system. In the first stage analysis, we run different regression models to explain the determinants of university's missions. Second stage employs Data Envelopment Analysis to assess the efficiency of Spanish public universities. Finally, in the third stage we propose a cluster analysis to get a better grasp about the strategic approaches followed by Spanish public universities to address their objective function. Our results suggest that universities can be classified in five different categories. Empirical findings shed some light on how these institutions align their internal resources and capabilities with their strategic orientation. The identified categories follow: efficient universities that are very good at publishing (Cluster 1); universities with a clear lack of resources and institutional support (Cluster 2); universities with a knowledge-transfer orientation (Cluster 3); specialised universities (Cluster 4); and universities with a more academic orientation (Cluster 5). These findings verify our intuition that universities tend to concentrate on certain specific competences, suggesting that universities implement their strategies in different ways according to their specific features and the characteristics of the region where they are located.
