Exploring the Role of Higher Education in Modern Ecosystems

In March 2018, a team of researchers at the IOE Laboratory for University Development traveled to Augsburg, Germany to present at this year’s conference, Higher Education in Modern Ecosystems: Efficiency, Society and Policies.  

Hosted by the University of Augsburg, the 2018 Conference has become a dynamic forum to share multiple scholarly perspectives, based on evidence from various corners of the globe, on how university systems have been contributing to different aspects of economic development and societal progress on the whole.

The event has welcomed a premier cohort of accomplished international experts in higher education. The conference’s keynote speakers included Dr. Stefano Paleari (University of Bergamo, Italy), Dr. Berthold U. Wigger (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany), and Dr. Tommaso Agasisti (Politecnico di Milano School of Management, Italy) who will join IOE in Moscow on July 1–6, 2018 as a faculty member for this year’s Second International Summer School ‘Inequality of Educational Opportunities.’  

In his report titled, Does the Efficiency of Higher Education Institutions Matter for Regional Economic Development? Evidence from Russia, IOE analyst Alexey Egorov gave a comprehensive outline of a recent study he has conducted together with Tommaso Agasisti, Daria Zinchenko and Oleg Leshukov that aims to evaluate the contribution of Russia’s higher education systems to their host regions. The authors measure the efficiency of a university by comparing the scale of returns that different HEIs can generate given the initial amount of economic resources available in each particular case. Also, the study explores various types of interregional effects from higher education systems that are located in geographic proximity to each other.      

In her conference talk, IOE analyst Ekaterina Shibanova touched on the performance of Russian universities that have been part of the ‘5–100’ National Academic Excellence Project. The paper she presented, Evaluating Efficiency of Russian Excellence-Driven Universities through Data Envelopment Analysis and Malmquist Index (coauthored with Tommaso Agasisti, Daria Platonova and Mikhail Lisyutkin), compares how the Project’s Phase One participant HEIs have performed against a benchmark group of guideline universities. The study views how well a given HEI has been delivering on the main ‘5–100’ Project KPIs as a proxy of its efficiency and productivity.