The effect of budget received from the government on rank received by Asia Times Higher Education: A case study of Thai universities

Abstract

This research article is for study purposes a positive relationship with raking received the two research questions required two different statistical tests. No study has tested the relationship between budget received and rank received, treating the second variable as ordinal, yet. Thus, there is a knowledge gap that needs to be filled. To investigate the relationship between (university) budget received and (ordinal) rank received by Asia Times Higher Education (THE). The context of this study included major Thai universities that participated in Asia. The data collection method was document review to capture the required data for analyses of the study. The data analyses included both descriptive and inferential statistics. The budget received was not correlated with (ordinal) rank received. While budget is still very important factor affecting ranking confirmed by previous research, universities that received less budget could still have chances of moving up the ranking ladder, as confirmed by the result of this study. In summary, this research offer a number of contributions. In term of knowledge, it extended  beyond the work of Kumar et al. by offering and examining new research questions. In term of theory, it proposed a (new) conceptual framework to examine the phenomenon of interest at hand. In term of methodology, it used a more advanced (inferential) statistic, OLR, to test the hypothesis of the study, in comparison with the work of Kumar et al. In term of practice, this will be discussed below. Based on the findings of the study, the results confirmed that budget received (ratio data) did not have a significant effect on rank received (ordinal data). This is, in fact, a desirable result. The result of the study has a clear implication for practice. Given that result, it implies that universities with less funding still have chances on moving up the ranking ladder. In other words, they do not have to wait for bigger budget to achieve higher ranking. In addition, it is also encouraged that universities interested in obtaining a rank position pursue the inexpensive routes.