Sergey Pyatenko, FBK ELS General Director, on the Current Business Education

The Russian Association of Managers (RAM) held a meeting of the Committee for Business Education on the subject of “Ratings of higher schools and off-rating education issues” within the framework of which spoke Sergey Pyatenko, the FBK Economic and Law School General Director. He spoke about the variance in parameters of different ratings, the consumer demands for educational services.

According to Sergey Pyatenko, there are now three major international ratings of higher schools: ARWU (the Shanghai rating), QS WUR, and the rating of Times Higher Education. There are differences in their methodologies, but they have a single unifying platform: 60-70% of weight comes to the criteria of “non-scientific nature” – the number of publications, the number of references citations, the higher school academic standing, etc. Obviously such a “quasi-scientific” bias (particularly to the narrow range of the English language journals, books are not taken into consideration at all) does not respond to the demands of consumers – employers and students. The main output of the higher schools is the knowledge/skills of graduates but not the scientific achievements of teachers. The employer as the consumer of higher school production does not care about the quantity of references to the teachers in the scientific journals. It is the graduate’s competence that is significant for him. The number of references to the teachers’ papers does not matter for the student either. What does matter for him is what good and useful things the teacher can teach him.

The ratings of higher institutions of Russia and CIS by the Expert RA agency that have been gaining popularity of late can be deemed as serious progress in the domestic analysis. Their weight of criteria related to the “conditions for good quality education” amounts to 50% and another 30% comes to “being of relevance for the employer”, and only 20% is left for “the science”. Such direction seems reasonable,” noted the FBK ELS General Director. The results of the rating on the demand for graduates from the world top 200 universities are interesting, too: the best employers prefer graduates from higher schools that are not the leaders in terms of the quantities of publications.

Recommend