Educational management reform in Thailand: roles of university classification

Abstract

The classification project represents a series of quality management efforts aimed at universities under the supervision of the Commission of Higher Education (CHE) in Thailand. Its primary objectives are to propose a framework on university classification and to provide guidelines on using its results for CHE and university administrators. In this study, the classification is based on the university's missions. The proposed classification framework consists of two dimensions, i.e., teaching and research. Each dimension contains two categories; i.e., leaning and neutral. For this study, one university can be classified as leaning in both the teaching and research dimensions. The use of quantitative data with the parameters defined in a ratio format is underlined. There are six parameters used for classifying the teaching dimension, while for the research dimension, there are three parameters. Based on the initial test with 22 public universities, the findings can be stated as follows: There are 15 teaching-leaning universities and ten universities classified as research-leaning. On the other hand, there are seven universities classified as teaching-neutral, and 12 universities labelled as research-neutral. To help verify the framework's applicability and acceptability, a public forum is adopted in conjunction with many follow-up meetings. The results were generally positive. Finally, research limitations and future work are discussed.