(1. School of Public Management, Northwest University, Xi’an Shaanxi 710069;2. School of Education, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan Hubei 430074)
Abstract: In China’s campaign to elevate its best universities into the world first-class level, overseas study visits serve as a key indicator of the internationalization of university faculties and an important way to improve their quality in the process. However, with the advent of scientific management, the introduction of quantitative evaluation and the emphasis it has received have, unintentionally, led to the negligence, on the part of both the faculty members and the administrative staff, of the nature of overseas studies. As a result, it has become the prevailing phenomena that university faculties go for overseas study experience for its own sake while the universities evaluate them for the sake of evaluation. As the overseas study experience has gradually become a key signal in assessing the faculty academic ability, it is important to make sure that it qualifies. This paper, by analyzing the data from the “2014 University Faculty Survey in China”, attempts to appraise the treatment effect of overseas study visits on the journal paper outputs by China’s university faculty members, employing the propensity scores match method. The study demonstrates that, methodically, the PSM coefficient is more precise than the traditional estimations, and, therefore, it better shows that the overseas study experience has exhibited no significant positive effect on the journal paper outputs. The study further reveals that there exists the more serious problem of adverse selection, and that is the pursuit of sheer signal effect by a substantial number of university faculty members, which is unfortunately leading to a productivity crisis in overseas studies. It is therefore finally pointed out in the paper that the consciousness to induce a necessary return to the nature of overseas studies needs to be raised on the part of all the three parties involved – the nation, the sending universities and the faculty members, if the effects of overseas studies are to be improved as hoped for.
Key words: university faculty; overseas study visits; journal paper outputs; propensity scores match method