Legitimacy deficits in the private higher education sector: categories in evaluating Russian universities

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores the regulators’ perspective and demonstrates how legitimacy deficits of private universities outweigh performance results in decisions regarding university inspections. We examined the period when the regulator had an urgent claim on Russian universities, particularly during the campaign to ‘clean the system of higher education’ announced in 2013. The Russian case of delayed regulation provides a unique natural phenomenon for studying how evaluators choose which universities to inspect. This study relies on administrative data on university inspections, which are merged with the results of annual evaluations of universities conducted by the Ministry from 2013 to 2016, encompassing 8227 cases. Our findings indicate that private universities and their branches are more likely to undergo inspection than public HEIs, even after considering information about their performance results. For state officials, private institutions exemplify market logic, which is seen as a competing rule of the game to state logic. These results suggest that organizational categories hold considerable promise for further research as they may contribute to understanding how universities are evaluated and scrutinized, a phenomenon typically considered as driven by performance-based criteria.