The Impact of Funding on the Quality of Public Higher Education in Poland

This article addresses the issue of public higher education institutions funding and its relation to the quality of teaching and academic research in Poland. In order to check whether the acquisition of more financial resources is positively correlated with quality, the paper takes financial data from university reports and juxtaposes them with, 1) their evaluation scores of universities given to them by the Polish Accreditation Committee, 2) research category grades given to Polish universities by the Polish Committee for Evaluation of Scientific Units, and 3) the individual positions of universities in world quality rankings. The paper applies also the Data Envelopment Analysis' scores and it is one of the first studies implementing this type of analysis to HEIs in Poland, and the only one with variables reflecting data of teaching quality and research activity. Through the analysis we find that HEIs with higher average teaching quality simultaneously have higher average scientific categories. There is also a substantial relationship between the revenue per student and revenue per teacher and variables describing quality. Lastly, we find that universities with greater teaching quality measures are more financially efficient, while better scientific position of universities coincides with a deterioration of financial efficiency