Higher Education Econometrics as a New Approach To Evaluating The Nexus Between Academic Teaching And Research

Abstract
Existing research into the nexus between academic teaching and research which has a long history, is mainly normative and identifies just a single dimensional relationship of the nexus, that is complementarity or substitutivity. After critically examining and highlighting the shortcomings as such, this article aims to develop a new and capable approach based on production-possibility frontier that recognizes and takes into consideration the three aspects of complementarity, substitutivity and neutrality involved in the relationship between teaching and research of faculty members. Study population of the current research is university academic staff out of whom 716 persons from a comprehensive university in Iran have been selected through clustering sampling. Data on teaching and research performance of the sample have been collected for the 2015-16 academic year adopting the promotion by-law of academic staff methodology and indicators. Using the approach which is based on the education production-possibility frontier named as Higher Education Econometric Approach, we showed that the nexus between teaching and research is multidimensional and heterogenous across different institutions and organizations.
The findings drawn from analyzing the data, using the new approach which simultaneously includes all dimensions of the nexus, show that 402 persons’ activities of 716 staff were located in substitutivity region of the production-possibility frontier, and 314 persons’ activities in complementarity region. Hence, the activities of 44 percent of sampled staff are located in the region within which their activity combination was identified as inappropriate. Thus, the teaching-research combination of academic staff of the university needs to change through reallocating their efforts and resources to achieve the appropriate combination. In addition, for the case of the university, 27 staff should reallocate their economic resources (i.e., time, efforts, funds,…) in favor of increasing their teaching activities and in contrast, 287 staff are to increase their research activities. In conclusion and in contrast to the conventional regression analysis, the new approach of higher education econometrics based on the education production-possibility frontier is powerful and capable enough to identify all aspects of the nexus and capable of examining the appropriateness of teaching-research activity combination by applying a positive and theoretical-based approach. The empirical results also provide important policy implications to reallocate resources at both individual and organizational levels.
Individuals can use the results to reallocate their limited resources especially time and efforts towards achieving more appropriate combination of teaching and research during their academic career. Universities and colleges should also apply such important findings in their faculty development plans and policies which would significantly contribute to the improvement of organizational productivity and efficiency. Nonetheless, there is a great degree of heterogeneity in the relationship between teaching and research across various disciplines and different educational levels which merits further empirical research.