![]() |
ИСТИНА |
Войти в систему Регистрация |
ИПМех РАН |
||
Russian higher educational system was highly concentrated in Soviet times and before. The universities were localized only in the largest cities like Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Nizhniy Novgorod, Samara, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Rostov, Yekaterinburg, etc. All of them were public (budget) organizations. Nowadays, the Russian higher education system has changing. There are a lot of private universities all over the Russia, including even small cities. Unfortunately, the quality of education in some of them is lower than in the budget universities. The aim of this paper is to evaluate which group of factors, a university’s characteristics or regional characteristics, have a greater influence on the competitiveness of universities in their ability to attract better students in Russia. The competitiveness of the universities was defined as an ability to accumulate the best applicants (future students). The results from this study might be useful for the government in evaluation of the universities and drawing the recommendation about the actions which should be done to attract more and better students by universities. The data source was Monitoring of the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation. The average score of the Unified State Examination of entrants from 449 public universities located in 79 Russian regions was used as the dependent variable. We evaluated the impact of traditional factors (like quality of education and reputation), the influence of the Triple Helix factors (science and innovation activities, government support, interaction with enterprises) as well as the role of the regional factors. The two-level model with contextual variables was applied for our purpose. University features such as the share of full-time students, the number of faculty members per student, research profits, university type (economic or not), etc. were found to be significant determinants of competitiveness, but for some of them the impact varies across the quantiles of the outcome variable. Innovation and research quality was proven to have only an indirect effect (via interactions with other factors). The 70% of the total variance was explained by the universities’ characteristics. We found that 22% of the unexplained variance is the result of the regional heterogeneity of the university’s competitiveness.