Higher Education Econometrics as A New Approach to Evaluating the Nexus between Academic Teaching and Research

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. After critically 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. 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 such staff needs to change through reallocating their efforts to achieve the appropriate combination. In addition, for the case of the university, 27 staff should reallocate their resources in favor of increasing their teaching activities and in contrast, 287 staff are to increase their research activities. In conclusion, it should be stressed that the new approach of higher education econometrics is powerful 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 results provide important policy implications to reallocate resources at both individual and organizational levels. Keywords: Academic staff, Teaching-research nexus, Performance, Complementarity and substitutivity, Higher education production-possibility frontier.