Is There a Trade-off between Research and Teaching at Universities? An economic perspective

1. The Role of Researchers at Universities

Since this April, I have been serving as a researcher at a national university in a non-metropolitan region. It goes without saying that our main duty as researchers is to pursue universal truths in the academic field through conducting research activities and writing books and papers. On the other hand, we must also teach students, which is regarded as part of the faculty’s duties at most universities. In recent years, students commonly rate their teachers’ lectures, and post such ratings on websites or social media. Presumably, these in turn affect the numbers of applicants to their universities. For researchers, the pressure is growing not only on the research front but also on the teaching front.

2. Relationship between Research and Teaching Responsibilities

There is almost complete agreement that the ability to secure research funding is the greatest factor in influencing a university researcher’s research activity. From that perspective, many studies have focused on the question of whether the availability of external funds (particularly competitive funds) promotes the research activity of universities. As reviewed by Koizumi et al. (2021), whereas some empirical studies showed that the availability of external funds contributes to an increase in research activity, some theoretical studies indicated the possibility that it may inhibit research activity. For example, Koizumi et al., using department-level data for Japanese national universities, found that the higher the share of external funds, the larger the number of papers produced, although the number of papers declines when the share of external funds exceeds a certain threshold. In other words, there is an appropriate level of external funds from the viewpoint of research productivity.

On the other hand, few empirical studies have analyzed the interaction between research and educational responsibilities that I mentioned earlier. Meanwhile, some theoretical research models have been developed in order to observe how universities compete with each other in terms of research output and student enrollments under the assumption of the presence of a trade-off between research and teaching. Some of those models predict that if external research funds are introduced, universities will be polarized into two groups—those concentrating on research and those concentrating on teaching (Del Rey, 2001; De Fraja and Iossa, 2002; De Fraja and Valbonesi, 2012). Other theoretical studies showed that, if confronted with a trade-off between research and teaching, some individual departments within universities will focus on research activity and, at the same time, choose to take advantage of other departments to get a free ride with respect to teaching responsibilities, a situation that results in a decline in overall tuition fee revenue for that university (Gautier and Wauthy, 2007).

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