Within VU Amsterdam it is often wrongly assumed that a successful defense leads to a matching fee for the university. Such ‘performance bonus’ sometimes even functions as a motivation to pursue joint doctorates or to balance a project budget. However, the funding is detached from performance. No such 'performance bonus' is awarded 1-to-1 for supervising a PhD candidate. Instead, the number of defended dissertations is only a parameter to determine the size of the flexible part of the research funding.
The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science annually determines the size of the research funding (1st flow of funds) for the university on the basis of a fixed base and a number of flexible components. The number of dissertations successfully defended at a university is one of those flexible components. The Ministry has determined a maximum for this flexible component: 20% of the total research funding in the 1st flow of funds. The result of this constant total amount, is that more dissertations lead to a lower funding per dissertation. In addition, the Ministry applies a 3-year average to smooth out fluctuations; VU Amsterdam applies the same method in the internal distribution key.
In the required calculation of the size of this flexible component and the check thereof by the accountant, only joint doctorates that are registered in Hora Finita are included. Therefore it remains important for faculties to register them in Hora Finita. In case of collaboration with foreign partner universities, only joint doctorates defended at the VU count. When it comes to a collaboration between two Dutch universities, it does not matter where the PhD student defends the dissertation; the doctorate automatically counts for 50% at both universities, provided a registration.