The end of the line? A quantitative analysis of two decades of competitive assessment and research funding in UK higher education

Abstract The Research Excellence Framework is a high-stakes exercise used by the UK government to allocate billions of pounds of quality-related research (QR) funding and used by the media to rank universities and their departments in national league tables. The 2008, 2014 and 2021 assessments were zero-sum games in terms of league table position because the outcomes were captured as Grade Point Averages (GPA) on a ratio scale, unlike the 1996 and 2001 iterations when departments were ranked on a simple seven-point ordinal scale. Although league tables were never part of the assessment itself, they were inevitable in 2008, 2014 and 2021 given the nature of the scoring, and subsequent league table position had a significant effect on investment and disinvestment within universities. This paper uses data from the 2008, 2014 and 2021 assessments to look at the changing competitiveness of different subjects, the size of submissions, and how these are related to QR funding. It finds that competition in the UK research sector is exceptionally tough, but that competitiveness and QR funding are so closely related to submission size that it calls into question the benefit of carrying out any more assessment exercises in their current format.