The applicability of performance-based funding mechanisms in Malaysian Public Universities

A performance-based funding (PBF) mechanism is now widespread in educational institutions in both developed and developing countries. The Malaysian Government also has intention to implement PBF in public universities, yet no study has explored the applicability of PBF implementation in Malaysian public universities to date. Hence, this study examined the drivers to the introduction of PBF in Malaysian public universities. An exploratory two-phased mixed-methods approach was employed to retrieve views from participants pertaining to PBF implementation in order to develop a survey questionnaire based on the gathered information. The selected participants for the semi-structured interviews were senior officers from the Bursar Office, while the respondents of the survey questionnaires composed of Dean and Deputy Dean of all Malaysian public universities. Thematic, descriptive, and inferential analyses were applied to examine the gathered qualitative and quantitative data. The outcomes signified that the main applicability drivers to the implementation of PBF were government objectives, level of understanding, and autonomy. All the drivers exhibited significant relationships with PBF implementation, whereas statistically significant differences were observed in autonomy between Research/Apex Universities and Focused Universities. On the contrary, no significant difference was noted between government objectives and level of understanding across university categories. The study outputs enable the Malaysian Government to have greater confidence in developing and implementing the PBF mechanism in Malaysian public universities