Laboratory for University Development

Publications

• Book

  Assessing the Contributions of Higher Education: Knowledge for a Disordered World

  What is ‘higher education’ and what does it do for persons, organisations, communities, cities, nations and the world? What difference does it make? How do we know? While these questions and others related to the contributions or effects of higher or tertiary education are discussed across the world, there is no agreement on what are those contributions. The higher education sector is connected to most other parts of society, and it is often difficult or impossible to isolate its discrete causal effects. In some quarters a disabling thinking prevails. Higher education is modelled as if all that this vast sector produces is measurable earnings benefits for individual graduates and new research-based products for globally competitive industry. Yet graduate earnings are partly shaped outside education, by family background and economic fluctuations; and higher education not only augments careers, it immerses students in knowledge, and it helps to shape them as people, and has many other individual and collective-social outcomes, as Assessing the contributions of higher education will show. Still, the fact that radical simplifications dominate this debate is not surprising. It is difficult to grasp the full range of what the sector does. There is no universal template and no comprehensive account. Perceptions of what higher education is vary according to beliefs about government and society, and the disciplinary or purposive lens used to view the sector, not to mention the interests at stake. Is both a common and comprehensive understanding possible, and if so, how? That question repeatedly returns during this book.

  Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023.

• Article

  Victoria Slepykh.

  Academic inbreeding and productivity of STEM early career researchers in different environments

  Academic inbreeding at the individual level is a characteristic of a scholar's career, when they work in the same organisations where they studied. The phenomenon is usually associated with reduced quality of human capital, low circulation of knowledge and ineffective human capital allocation. However, there are a number of countries where academic inbreeding is widespread, but how it affects the research productivity of early career researchers has not been sufficiently explored. This article aims to specify the correlation between academic inbreeding and the individual productivity of early-career researchers within the system characterised by the high level of inbreeding. The study uses environments with different infrastructural and organisational conditions as moderators to clarify the peculiarities of the relationship. Based on data about 1132 early-career researchers in four fields of study it was found that the publication activity of inbred-researchers does not differ from that of their mobile counterparts at prestigious organisations or in regions having middle and small number of academic organisations. However, academic inbreeding negatively correlates with research productivity at universities without special status and in metropolitan regions. Thus, when the organisational environment provides a high quality of human capital for its graduates, the effect of academic inbreeding is mitigated. The same effect of inbreeding is observed in environments with poor choice of employers.

  Research Policy. 2025. Vol. 54. No. 6.

• Book chapter

  Panova A., Slepyh V.

  Science or industry: Improving the quality of the Russian higher education system

  In bk.: Vocation, Technology & Education. Vol. 1. Iss. 4. Shenzhen Polytechnic University, 2024.

• Working paper

  Egorov A., Agasisti T., Serebrennikov P.

  How Do The Characteristics Of The Environment Influence University Efficiency? Evidence From A Conditional Efficiency Approach

  This paper explores the black box behind efficiency measurements in higher education and define the determinants of university efficiency. Particularly, it investigates how the efficiency of universities is affected by the characteristics of the territory in which they operate. We propose an analysis that combines two perspectives: 1) the resource dependence theory, suggesting that the location of university can determine the amount of resources available to it; 2) institutional isomorphism, according to which the characteristics of other higher education institutions located in the same area may shape the university production function and the efficiency of its operations. In order to test this framework we use the data on Russian universities and non-parametric conditional order-m efficiency estimator with two categories of exogenous variables. The first group includes the social, economic and cultural characteristics of the region where the university is located. The second set includes the characteristics of other higher education institutions located in the same region. Our findings highlight that the managerial efficiency of universities is strongly associated with the characteristics of the environment in which they operate

  Economics/EC. WP BRP. Высшая школа экономики, 2020. No. 238.