Higher Education Institutions Resilience During Covid‑19 Post-Pandemic: A Quantitative Approach

Abstract

The pandemic of COVID-19 has had a significant impact on higher education institutions (HEI). The question is whether HEI have been able to adapt to the pandemic's new normal. There is a need for quantifying the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on HEI in a formal manner. This paper aims to presents a structural quantitative approach to operationalizing a proposed conceptual framework that addresses the resilience of HEI in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. So far, there has been little quantitatively based empirical research on HEI resilience. Even though several authors proposed formidable frameworks for conceptualizing organizational resilience, none of these studies presented quantitative evidence of the COVID-19 pandemic of HEI resilience. The current study aims to quantify the HEI resilience framework by measuring the inter-relationships between the components of the framework using Structural Equation Modeling with Partial Least Squares (SEM-PLS) method. The data from 121 public and private universities in Malaysia were collected and used as a basis for determining the significant relationships in the HEI resilience framework. The empirical findings demonstrated that the (higher order) three stages of HEI resilience, namely anticipation, coping, and adaptation, which were precedingly linked to four HEI capability (lower-order) constructs, namely knowledge-based, resources availability, social resources, and power-based, positively influence HEI Resilience. In the meantime, the knowledge-based and power-based capabilities of the HEI appeared to have significant indirect effects on their resilience via their adaptation stage. Recommendations for practice and research were also discussed.