The relationship between research performance and teaching outcome: Evidence from higher education in South Korea

초록

I Introduction Korea achieved very rapid expansion of university education over the past 30 years, and now 82 percent of high school graduates enter universities and colleges. This rapid increase in the number of students has increased the unemployment rate of university graduates. In the meantime, universities in Korea and the government place stronger emphasis on research completed by faculties, and provide various incentives for research. Strong emphasis on research is commonly observed in most of the high ranked universities in the world. Does emphasis on research help or hinder labor market performance of students? The relationship between the faculty research output and the teaching outcome in higher education has attracted much interest. The relationship is theoretically ambiguous. Hattie and Marsh (1996) outline the theories by education researchers that can lead to a negative, a positive, or an independent relationship between the two. For example, a negative relationship can arise since the two activities compete for the faculty member’s limited time, while a positive relationship can arise since the abilities underlying the success of the two activities is similar. Thus the direction and the size of the relationship should be studied empirically. Hattie and Marsh (1996) survey empirical studies of the relationship and conduct a meta analysis of the correlations between research outcomes such as the number of publications, citations, or grants and teaching effectiveness, mostly measured by student evaluations published in 58 studies in education. They find that the weighted average of the correlations is slightly positive, about 0.06 and conclude that the relationship is zero. In a follow-up study, Marsh and Hattie (2002) reach the same conclusion using data from a university in Australia. Most of these studies are, however, based on small samples and measure the teaching outcome by subjective student or peer evaluations that may have only a tenuous link to the labor market performance of graduates. To overcome the limits of the previous studies, in this chapter we use a large sample that covers the high education sector for the entire country and measure the teaching outcome by objective measures of success: (a) the proportion of graduates who have secured a regular full-time job, or (b) who advance into post-graduate study. These two measures are likely to be more directly related to the human capital augmented by higher education than the subjective student evaluations. We find that the raw association between the faculty research output and student achievements in the labor market or advance into post-graduate studies is strongly positive and statistically significant, but that the association is explained mostly by departmental characteristics, student quality and university fixed effects. Given these factors, the association between the research output and the percentage of the graduates who have found regular employment becomes almost zero and statistically insignificant. The association between the research output and the percentage of graduates pursuing post-graduate study is also reduced after those factors are controlled for, but in the sciences and engineering sector it is still statistically significant. The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. In Section II we provide an overview of the university system in Korea and the employment performance of university graduates. In Section III we discuss the model and explain the data used in this study. In Section IV we present the estimation results. In Section V we summarize the findings and conclude the chapter.