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

  Panova A., Matveeva N., Sterligov I.

  Who funds whom exactly? A study of funding acknowledgments

  Research funding plays a crucial role in the production of knowledge, and its nature varies considerably from country to country. Numerous studies have analyzed research funding from a bibliometric perspective. However, the role of individual authors in attracting funding remains understudied, and it may be crucial for many actors. We propose a new approach that provides a more accurate picture and test it on post-Soviet countries with low scientific production. We analyze the funding sources of the most visible part of the natural sciences by focusing on the funding acknowledgments of their papers in Nature Index journals published in 2017–2021. Both the country of origin and types of sources are accounted for. Our approach reveals marked differences between traditionally used paper-level and proposed author-level funding links. The shares of funding sources measured in this way are very different, especially with regard to foreign sources and the role of specific countries. This is particularly important when studying international papers and the roles of the countries involved, even more so for the countries with lower research capacity. Utilizing a case-driven funding sources classification, we paint a rich picture of diverging post-Soviet funding landscapes, mostly driven by national grants and EU-wide programmes.

  Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 2025.

• 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.