A Study On Performance Funding Of Higher Education In The United States

Since 1980s, the international higher education focused on the quality and efficiency of higher education rather than quantitative expansion. With the expansion of higher education and the growing of per cost, the cost of tertiary education has increasingly become a heavy task that the government can not support. The proportion of public funding of higher education in the public spending relatively reduced. Higher education financial crisis was increasingly serious. With the relative declining of the government's financial capacity and the rising of external accountability, the major developed countries have begun to seek changes of the higher education. And an important feature of higher education will be to incorporate the performance funding into financial system. The United States is one of the first counties which launching and practicing the performance funding. The United States has a very long history of performance funding, with a very mature theoretical support and practical experience. Studying their performance funding will have a veryimportant theoretical and practical significance.The main contents of this paper include the background, the development process, and the implementing process of the performance funding of higher education in the United States. The article will analyze the characteristics, problems and the experience of the performance funding of higher education; finally, proposes the policy suggestions for the reform of the higher education in our county.This paper starts from the theoretical foundation of the performance funding of higher education in the United States, outlines several major existing funding models of higher education in the United States; as well as the application process of new public management theory, performance theory in the field of higher education. And then the article summed up the advantages, including improving efficiency of the use of funds, improving school performance, responding to the financial accountability outside, and taking a clear mission and objectives for the university. Finally, the article will take Tennessee and South Carolina's performance funding of higher education as case studying, study the implementing conditions and characteristics of performance funding. The conclusion of the study includes that the implementation of the performance funding of higher education in the U.S. relies more on higher education coordinating agency, the implementation of the performance funding of higher education in the U.S. bases on the assessment, the implementation of the performance funding of higher education in the U.S. as possible as to consider more factors. The last chapter, on the basis of the above discussion, combining our country higher education financial allocation, drawing the lessons of the experience of the United States, incorporating with the actual situation of China, proposes the usable suggestions to reform funding mechanism of our country.