Abstract
The modern approaches towards higher education systems management often tend to focus on separate universities’ performance, lacking the systemic view of the overall higher education systems’ competitiveness. Thus, the policymakers often fail in tailoring the higher education strategies to the mission of higher education in contemporary society. The article focuses on providing a systemic insight into the global competitive positioning of the national higher education systems. Based on the suggested ranking methodology, the authors perform the evaluation and ranking of 94 higher education systems, highlighting the limitations of this method, and the cluster analysis, identifying 3 types of their competitive positioning: leaders, followers, and underperformers. Based on Pearson coefficients of skewness and kurtosis calculation, the article shows that globally the inequalities in terms of higher education enrolment rate are decreasing, while those of R&D institutions quality and university-industry collaboration in research remain unchanged. Therefore, upgrading higher education quality assurance systems becomes the main strategic priority for the developing countries in terms of ensuring their higher education systems’ competitiveness. Given the levelling of higher education attainment and its quality worldwide, the authors anticipate further specialization of the universities and broadening of their role within the national innovation system. The article shows that the more comprehensive the approach for evaluating the higher education systems performance – the better the policymakers may benefit in terms of higher education strategic management.
Highlights
One of the determining factors for achieving the goals of sustainable economic growth and increasing the global competitiveness of countries is the creation of favorable conditions for the development of human capital, conditioned by establishment of a higher education system, which through a set of legal, organizational, economic and information mechanisms ensures the continuous generation of knowledge, its dissemination, and formation of the competencies for the future in the society
The problem of theoretical understanding of the influence of the national higher education systems and of the research universities in particular on the competitive development of a state, as well as the identification of effective mechanisms and roadmaps for increasing their global competitiveness, poses a challenge to scholars and governments of different countries, which determines the relevance of the topic under study
Systems based on the following indicators: (I1) tertiary education enrolment rate; (I2) higher educa- The dynamics of higher education quality, tertiary tion quality index; (I3) impact of scientific publica- education enrolment rate, quality of national retions (H-index); (I4) university-industry collabora- search institutions, and intensity of collaboration tion in R&D; (I5) attractiveness for international between universities and industry in R&D over students; (I6) share of the national universities in the last decade was investigated based on the data the Top 900 world universities ranking; (I7) quality from WEF (2017a)
Summary
One of the determining factors for achieving the goals of sustainable economic growth and increasing the global competitiveness of countries is the creation of favorable conditions for the development of human capital, conditioned by establishment of a higher education system, which through a set of legal, organizational, economic and information mechanisms ensures the continuous generation of knowledge, its dissemination, and formation of the competencies for the future in the society. Nationwide, finding the best-tailored solutions and creating the conditions for the national research universities’ transformation into drivers of innovation becomes one of the main focus areas of the developing countries In this context, the problem of theoretical understanding of the influence of the national higher education systems and of the research universities in particular on the competitive development of a state, as well as the identification of effective mechanisms and roadmaps for increasing their global competitiveness, poses a challenge to scholars and governments of different countries, which determines the relevance of the topic under study. The article aims to provide the comprehensive insight into the global competitive positioning of the national higher education systems through performing the ranking of the national higher education systems and their cluster analysis It aims to assess the main inequalities worldwide in terms of higher education quality, enrolment rate, R&D institutions’ quality, and university-industry collaboration in research. Cator of the number of international students; the SCImago data on H-index of citations were used
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