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How Ontario's new PSE funding system, which is allegedly 60% "performance-based", really only puts at most 0.4% of total funds at risk based on performance. Everybody update your talking points, please. @RossRomanoSSM @ChrisGloverMPP https://higheredstrategy.com/ontarios-pbf-system-much-ado-about-nothing/
A note to all my US tweeps who follow the PBF-debates. There's a chunk of the US literature which focuses on the nominal size of the performance-based pot (Tennessee = 100! Ohio = 50! etc). I think if you did this kind of analysis with US states, you'd find similar results.
Which is a reason to be skeptical of a lot of the difference-in-differences analyses of the "effectiveness" of PBF. Simply put, the amount of money which is truly at risk in these schemes *in any single year* is pretty small - you shouldn't expect to find many short-term changes.
The issue is how the incentives change *over the long-term*, and what kinds of processes institutions adopt to try to capture those incentives. The quant lit says not much changed in TN, for instance. But the qual work - which actually looked at processes, suggests the opposite.
Anyways, point is, for any PBF analysis: the size of the incentive matters. And the size of the incentive is a function of the algorithms inside the PBF envelope, not the size of the envelope.
