The Russian Excellence Initiative for higher education: a nonparametric evaluation of short‐term results

Abstract

This research studies the short-term effects of the Russian Excellence Initiative Project 5-100 on participating universities. To trace the effect, we develop a quasi-experimental methodology. A control group of universities comparable to the Project 5-100 universities at the starting point of the program's implementation was singled out using propensity score matching. Data envelopment analysis was conducted, and the Malmquist productivity index was calculated to trace how and why the efficiency of the "participants" and "nonparticipants" of the Project 5-100 has changed. We find statistically significant positive effects of the policy both on the productivity and on the efficiency of the participating universities.

Autonomy, Performance And Efficiency: An Empirical Analysis Of Russian Universities 2014-2018

“…The intuition is that this might happen for two mutually reinforcing reasons: first, formally autonomous universities are diverse and gained this legal status under varying circumstances; secondly, a large sub-group of formally autonomous universities are leading institutions that operate on larger scales, and as we allow the variable return to scale assumption to be true, these universities might demonstrate comparatively lower efficiency scores if there are decreasing returns to scale. A reverse scenario was observed in 2015/2016, when there was a new wave of the Russian Excellence Initiative (for details see Agasisti et al, 2019) which coincided with the acquisition of formal autonomous status by two more universities. This might demonstrate that some large leading and formally autonomous universities tried to join the excellence race by demonstrating better results.…”

The rise of multiple institutional affiliations in academia

“…Sources of such performance change other than the monetary investments are the concentration of resources, focus on measurable research outputs, and orientation towards international research agendas and publication outputs, which contribute towards higher international visibility (Salmi, 2016). There is substantial existing evidence on the impact of ExIns on publication output, for example from China's 985 project (Zhang, Patton, & Kenney, 2013;Zong & Zhang, 2019), Russia's 5-100 project (Agasisti, Shibanova, Platonova, & Lisyutkin, 2020;Turko, Bakhturin, Bagan, Poloskov, & Gudym, 2016), Germany's Excellence Initiative (Civera, Lehmann, Paleari, & Stockinger, 2020;Menter, Lehmann, & Klarl, 2018) or Taiwan's World Class University project (Fu, Baker, & Zhang, 2020), which provide evidence of positive, but also mixed performance effects of these initiatives.…”

“…There is also some evidence that ExIns aimed at elite institutions may not only improve the international ranking of "excellence" universities (Benito et al, 2019;Salmi, 2016), but that they can lift other, unfunded institutions (Agasisti et al, 2020;Civera et al, 2020;Fu et al, 2020). The increase in stratification associated with ExIns and the concentration of resources make emerging elite institutions very attractive for outside researchers.…”

The Rise of Multiple Institutional Affiliations in Academia

“…Sources of such performance change other than the monetary investments are the concentration of resources, focus on measurable research outputs, and orientation towards international research agendas and publication outputs, which contribute towards higher international visibility (Salmi, 2016). There is substantial existing evidence on the impact of ExIns on publication output, for example from China's 985 project (Zhang, Patton, & Kenney, 2013;Zong & Zhang, 2019), Russia's 5-100 project (Agasisti, Shibanova, Platonova, & Lisyutkin, 2020;Turko, Bakhturin, Bagan, Poloskov, & Gudym, 2016), Germany's Excellence Initiative (Civera, Lehmann, Paleari, & Stockinger, 2020;Menter, Lehmann, & Klarl, 2018) or Taiwan's World Class University project (Fu, Baker, & Zhang, 2020), which provide evidence of positive, but also mixed performance effects of these initiatives.…”

“…There is also some evidence that ExIns aimed at elite institutions may not only improve the international ranking of "excellence" universities (Benito et al, 2019;Salmi, 2016), but that they can lift other, unfunded institutions (Agasisti et al, 2020;Civera et al, 2020;Fu et al, 2020). The increase in stratification associated with ExIns and the concentration of resources make emerging elite institutions very attractive for outside researchers.…”