Academic Funding and Allocation of Research Money

Abstract

The funding that goes into higher education strongly influences what university professors teach and research, and therefore it has been one of the issues most central to higher education reforms since the early 1990s. While higher education reforms are largely affected by the finance of higher education, higher education funding has been used as a vehicle to push higher education reforms. In the first part of this chapter, changes that have taken place in higher education funding since the early 1990s are examined. Changes in research fund allocation and the influence of those changes on research activities are analyzed later in this chapter. Within the university sector, disparities in the resource allocation had become established by the 1990s, and since then no significant change in such structure has been observed even after systemic revision such as transformation of the national universities into national university corporations. As the extent of the competitive research fund increases further, it is clear that provision of individual research funding has been weakened at the level of individual university teachers. When we look at the relationship between research funding awarded and research productivity, there is a demonstrated tendency to achieve higher productivity with larger amounts of research funding, though in 2007 productivity versus the research funding provided to university teachers has not improved compared with 1992. While research funding to university teachers in Japan has increased, mainly by virtue of the competitive research fund, however, as typically observed in the decrease of research time, conditions necessary to utilize the increased research funding have rather tended to deteriorate.