Performance Evaluation of College and University Faculty: An Economic Perspective

This article applies the economic model of utility maximization to two important controversies in the area of faculty performance evaluation: the relationship between teaching effectiveness and research productivity and the validity of student evaluations of teaching effectiveness. It is argued that the economic model provides plausible explanations for many seemingly anomalous results from the empirical literature and, at the same time, suggests appealing avenues for improving the statistical methodology used in estimating relationships required in order to formulate genuinely optimal performance evaluation methods.