Global Universities Ranking

Russian (CIS)
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Nowadays Russia solves ambitious tasks to return lost positions in areas of education, science and technologies. In particular, the higher education reform assumes accelerated development of several dozens of Russian universities: national, federal, research universities, which are competitive at the world educational market, and also investigations and elaborations.

In this regard, the task of comparing the best Russian higher schools with the leading world universities seems rather topical. Establishing resuming evaluation of the world best universities lets us to estimate dynamics of competitiveness rates of Russian higher educational institutions.

At the present moment there are four types of comparative evaluation of universities: accreditation, league tables, ranking and rating (see the glossary).

A rating system, which allows reducing the whole diversified activity of universities to ordinary and comparable index numbers, has been chosen as a system of universities evaluation.

In our case the rating helps us to trace the progress of the rates of Russian higher educational institutions and estimate the position of Russian universities among the world ones, i.e. to compare educational quality, given by global higher institutions of education.

Creation of so called “global ratings”, where the best higher institutions of education were compared, started with the beginning of the ХХI century, accompanied by establishing university ratings in some countries.

In 2003 the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University was first to release a rating of world top 500 institutes of higher education. In 2004 the first annual rating of the special supplement of the newspaper Times was published. (Times Higher Education Supplement, QS-THES).

In 2004 a Spanish project Webometrics was launched: it was a global rating which included almost four thousand world higher institutions of education.

In 2005 the magazine Newsweek International started to publish its global rating of the universities.

In 2007 a rating of scientific activity of global universities was established for the first time by Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council Taiwan.

The findings of the global universities ratings are studied by the representatives of the following target groups:

  1. University entrants, who want to get a qualitative education in their own country or abroad.
  2. Administration of almost all the universities in the world.
  3. Personnel departments of the biggest global companies, interested in attracting the most talented graduated of the leading global universities.
  4. Administration of national educational and innovative systems, who aim to increase competitiveness of these systems.
  5. Big philanthropists, as educational and research establishments are still the most attractive objects of philanthropy.
  6. Representatives of international and national administrative bureaucracies, who are not indifferent to this.

The analysis of the existing global ratings shows that the comparative evaluation of the universities is mainly based on evaluation of their achievements and opportunities in the area of research and development. Along with this, almost no attention is given to a problem of education quality evaluation.

At the same time, in comparison to foreign universities, Russian universities nowadays have the main task - providing qualitative education, complied with state educational standards and labor market requirements. Compared to a number of developed countries, education and science are still divided administratively in Russia, so using the existing global ratings to evaluate competitiveness of education, provided by Russian universities can solve the given task only indirectly.

As there is a growing interest of the Russian academic society to international evaluations of Russian universities, necessity to determine the place of Russian universities in the global educational system, importance of developing an instrument of evaluating competitiveness of Russian higher professional education in a dynamic dimension Independent Rating Agency RatER is realizing this project – New Global Ranking of World Universities, which, as we hope, will become a logical addition to the existing global ratings of higher institutions of education.

It should be mentioned that the people, who prepare the rating do not set the goals of raising the position of Russian universities artificially by means of using existing weighting factors and rates. The rating is not a measure of protection policy, but a research instrument.

This is the first experience of making the global rating of universities in Russia, so we would like to ask all participants of the Project and website visitors to take an active part in it.