Institute of Education

Given the ambitious national strategies for science, innovations and university development in Russia, the availability

for young highly qualifi ed specialists who can be competitive at the global job market, is vital. At the same time,

as of now, Russia, unlike many other countries, does not have a comprehensive set of initiatives addressing the brain

drain among Russian students that obtain their degrees abroad.

This article provides an analysis of motivations of Russian perspective graduate (master and doctoral) students who plan

to study abroad and emigrate after graduation, as well as the factors that may positively aff ect their decision to return to

Russia. In addition, the research provides an overview of international policies and practices to prevent the brain drain,

and the opportunities for developing such policies in our country.

Over the past 60 years, the topic of social inequality has been one of the key to educational research. Since the 90's years of the last century, thanks to the advent of international monitoring, the main focus is on comparisons of different countries in terms of educational opportunities, as well as academic and social segregation in schools. At the same time, it is known that even within countries, especially those with a great geographical extent, differences in access to educational resources and in learning outcomes can be very large.

Our work complements the existing discussion on spatial inequality in education. In this paper, we analyze the hierarchical structure of the educational system in countries with a moderate level of centralization, when access to resources can vary at three levels: between schools in a municipality, between municipalities in regions and between regions. We analyze the variation of school ICT-resources, teachers’ characteristics, and students’ outcomes in Russian language, mathematics and computer science on between- and within-regional levels. For these aims, we operate a unique dataset of nearly 40 000 Russian schools.

Our results show the existing gap between Russian schools, municipalities, and regions in access to educational resources and educational results. The uneven distribution of resources between territories, as a result of unbalanced decentralized policy, creates a situation of “double penalty” or “double bonus” for students.

This paper studies the relationship between university institutional autonomy (both formal and informal) and their performance and efficiency using multi-stage empirical methodology. First, we measure an “autonomy-in-use” index, and then we employ Data Envelopment Analysis in order to evaluate institutional efficiency. Lastly, we use a panel fixed effect regression and an instrumental variable approach to provide robust evidence for the relationship between institutional autonomy, performance and efficiency. We find that formal status of autonomy does not predict higher publication activity or efficiency. However, the findings also reveal that informal autonomy is positively associated with efficiency scores, and advanced practices in staff management can contribute to increases in publication activity and overall institutional efficiency.